Physical Audit of Fort Knox Gold?
February 17th, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
One of the biggest questions over the past 50 years is whether the gold at Fort Knox, Kentucky is really there, or if it’s been plundered.
What we do know is that the last ‘audit’ of America’s gold stash was conducted on Sept. 23, 1974, when the US Treasury opened just one of its 15 vaults at Fort Knox so politicians and reporters could swarm the site for a two-hour photo-op with roughly 6% of the alleged amount held. Adding to the complete farce, none of the bars being passed around for the cameras were matched to a serial number, assayed or tested for purity, or even verified as US holdings – as foreign countries have previously stored their gold at Fort Knox as well.
Since then there has been no independent verification of the roughly 4,580 metric tons supposedly held by the Treasury outside of bullshit annual ‘vault seal checks’ that don’t actually analyze the gold…
Social Security Scams: “This Might Be The Biggest Fraud In History”
February 17th, 2025Biggest fraud in history? haha
G. Edward Griffin, hold my beer: The Creature from Jekyll Island
Back on February 1st, I wrote:
My guess is that we’ll hear more about things like Social Security fraud and less about whatever it is that LockheedMartin actually did with over $61 billion just in 2023.
But, by all means:
Maybe we pause payments to everyone 120+ until they can authenticate they’re among the living…
Via: ZeroHedge:
According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security ?? pic.twitter.com/ltb06VX98Z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
“Maybe we pause payments to everyone 120+ until they can authenticate they’re among the living, to start,” Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) wrote on X in response to Musk’s post.
Collins is far too conservative. Lawmakers should freeze payments over the age bucket of 100 until a clear determination can be made where taxpayer funds are disappearing in this possible money pit that smells like fraud.
“If DOGE’s numbers are right, $522B—1/3 of ALL spending on Social Security each year—is fraudulent,” X user Robert Sterling said.
Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills
February 15th, 2025Via: Gizmodo:
Artificial intelligence may one day make humans obsolete—just not in the way that you’re thinking. Instead of AI getting so good at completing tasks that it takes the place of a person, we may just become so reliant on imperfect tools that our own abilities atrophy. A new study published by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that the more humans lean on AI tools to complete their tasks, the less critical thinking they do, making it more difficult to call upon the skills when they are needed.
U.S. Aircraft Carrier Collides with Cargo Ship in Mediterranean Sea
February 14th, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
How is that two massive ships, one a US Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, crash into each other on the open waters of the Mediterranean? That’s what Pentagon investigators will be looking at in the wake of Wednesday’s incident off Egypt.
The USS Harry S. Truman and the Panamanian-flagged merchant vessel Besiktas-M collided at around noon local time on Wednesday.
AI Delaying New Tech Adoption?
February 14th, 2025Via: Vale:
Large language models, especially those on the scale of many of the most accessible, popular hosted options, take humongous datasets and long periods to train. By the time everything has been scraped and a dataset has been built, the set is on some level already obsolete. Then, before a model can reach the hands of consumers, time must be taken to train and evaluate it, and then even more to finally deploy it.
Once it has finally released, it usually remains stagnant in terms of having its knowledge updated. This creates an AI knowledge gap. A period between the present and AI’s training cutoff. This gap creates a time between when a new technology emerges and when AI systems can effectively support user needs regarding its adoption, meaning that models will not be able to service users requesting assistance with new technologies, thus disincentivising their use.
Hole Blasted By Drone In Chernobyl’s Radiation Shield
February 14th, 2025Via: The War Zone:
While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said there was no immediate radiation release, the massive, complexly designed New Safe Containment (NSC) structure was compromised and could suffer further damage, the experts told us. In addition, one expert expressed concern that in a worst-case scenario, the ensuing repair work could require the entire containment structure to be rolled back on tracks, exposing the destroyed inner core that the NSC was designed to encapsulate.
Our World Faces ‘Unprecedented’ Spike in Electricity Demand
February 14th, 2025Via: The Register:
The world is going to need a lot of new electricity generation in the next three years to keep up with an “unprecedented” spike in demand, says the International Energy Agency (IEA) – and it’s going to be a tough goal to meet.
The IEA’s report examines the current state of the electricity market and how it’s likely to change between 2025 and 2027, forecasting that the world is going to need an additional 3,500 terawatt-hours of energy generation to meet rising demand over the next three years. That, the IEA noted, is the equivalent of adding more electricity consumption than Japan, per year, between now and 2027.
To put that into further perspective, Japan is the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the world, eating up more than 1,000 TWh of electricity per year. That’s a lot of juice to add to global energy generation in a mere three years, and most of that is going to be in emerging markets, the IEA said.
World’s First Hybrid Quantum Supercomputer Reimei Activated in Japan
February 14th, 2025Via: Interesting Engineering:
Engineers in Japan have activated Reimei, the world’s first hybrid quantum supercomputer. The 20-qubit quantum machine has been integrated into Fugaku, the world’s sixth-fastest supercomputer.
The hybrid system is designed to solve problems that classical supercomputers take much longer to process. The machine is housed at the Riken scientific institute in Saitama, near Tokyo, and will primarily support research in physics and chemistry.
Ron Paul: Trump’s Good Ideas and Bad Ideas
February 14th, 2025“If you really want to know what’s behind this whole mess, you have to audit the Fed.”
President Trump likes to keep everyone on their toes. He has proven to say things that (in the end) were perhaps never meant to be taken seriously in the first place.
Sometimes the president's statements are bad ideas, like the U.S. owning Gaza. But at other times, his… pic.twitter.com/ofjOcH67ZX
— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) February 14, 2025
HHS Spent More Than $22B on Grants for Migrants — Including Cash for Cars, Home Loans and Startups
February 13th, 2025Via: New York Post:
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ramped up grants for migrants from 2020 to 2024 — which included cash assistance to buy cars, homes and even build credit for startup businesses, according to a shocking watchdog report that found taxpayers were left on the hook for $22.6 billion.
HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) — which came under fire last year for having lost track of 32,000 migrant kids in the US — handed out the high sum to a host of nonprofits, effectively acting as a “giant magnet” for those crossing the US border and claiming asylum, auditors from the money monitor OpenTheBooks revealed exclusively to The Post.
Tasked with settling migrants, asylum seekers and other refugees in America, ORR drastically increased the number of noncitizens eligible to receive funding over the bulk of President Joe Biden’s term, with more than $10 billion shelled out to grant-receiving organizations just in fiscal year 2023.
That coincided with all-time records being set for southern border crossings into the US, with 2.4 million apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection over the same period.
Non-governmental groups bilked taxpayers for up to $1.7 billion in services including dollar-for-dollar matching savings plans for cars, homes, college educations or startups; small-business loans of up to $15,000; loans to repair credit history of up to $1,500; “cultural orientation,” “emergency housing support,” legal assistance and Medicaid care.
