Free Republic

My startling chat with Grok Grok tries to serve Elon Musk, the aggressive censors at X, and me X deleted several of my posts with no explanation. Instead of complaining to X, I contacted Grok and asked why my posts were being vaporized. We communicated for 45 minutes, which resulted in more than 25 pages of single-space copy! People wonder what AI is all about. I can report that Grok does everything super-fast. He (she if you prefer) does not make grammatical or spelling mistakes. Like me, he loves alliteration. Whatever you say, he weaves that into his conversation so...

Senior Justice Department officials announced late Thursday criminal charges against Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-time director of security James Wolfe. The indictment charges Wolfe with making false statements to the FBI and details how Wolfe passed classified information, including presumably information related to one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page, to a series of media outlets, confirming long-standing suspicions of the career intelligence community’s complicity in leaks. The three-count indictment charges Wolfe with separate instances of making false statements to the FBI, not directly charging him for leaking classified information, but appearing to detail how he did allegedly leaked classified information to...

Beale Air Force Base, Calif. – On the evening of July 31st, a TU-2S Dragon Lady from the 9th Reconnaissance Wing took off from Beale Air Force Base (AFB) to begin a flight unlike any the U-2 airframe had done before. Seventy years after the very first Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady’s accidental maiden flight in 1955 by Tony LeVier over Groom Lake, Nevada, the U-2 would finish the longest single flight this platform had ever attempted, flying across all 48 contiguous states of the United States. An icon of the Cold War, the U-2 continues to provide high altitude intelligence,...

When I was a kid in the 1980s, my parents sent me to a Waldorf school in England. At the time, the school discouraged parents from allowing their kids to watch too much TV, instead telling them to emphasize reading, hands-on learning and outdoor play. I chafed at the stricture then. But perhaps they were on to something: Today I don’t watch much TV and I still read a lot. Since my school days, however, a far more insidious and enticing form of tech has taken hold: the internet, especially via smartphones. These days I know I have to put...

Got a free tractor if I could start it!

Hey folks, got some important news to share. You know Tulsi Gabbard, right? Well, she’s now the big boss for America’s top spies, and she’s making big changes. She started a special group in April to clean up the mess in the U.S. government. This group is called “DIG” for Director’s Initiatives Group, and it’s all about making sure our spy agencies are honest and open. DIG’s job is to do what President Trump wants with our spy stuff. They’ve got some of the smartest people working hard to expose how the Biden administration used secret agents against regular Americans....

The IDF publishes a summary of Operation Rising Lion, ... According to the report, for months leading up to the operation, Military Intelligence gathered evidence that Iran was rapidly enriching uranium to 60% - a level sufficient to produce several nuclear bombs in a short time. Intelligence also revealed a covert regime plan involving advanced nuclear weapon research and experimentation in key areas. In parallel, the Iranian regime was preparing to triple its production of precision missiles, expanding its arsenal from 2,500 to 8,000 missiles. This was part of a broader strategy that included a multi-front attack against Israel, beginning...

ChatGPT can harm an individual’s critical thinking over time, a study released this month suggests. Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab asked subjects to write several SAT essays and separated subjects into three groups — using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using Google’s search engine and using nothing, which they called the “brain‑only” group. Each subject’s brain was monitored through electroencephalography (EEG), which measured the writer’s brain activity through multiple regions in the brain. They discovered that subjects who used ChatGPT over a few months had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” according to the study. The...

In a report reviewed exclusively by Breitbart Texas, human intelligence developed by frontline Border Patrol intelligence officers reveals the possibility of a formal covert operation being conducted by the Maduro regime. The operation is designed to infiltrate the United States using released inmates and pairing them with Venezuelan intelligence operatives to “neutralize” human targets within the United States. The report’s narrative, generated by the Rio Grande Valley Sector Intelligence Unit (SIU), indicates that released inmates from Venezuelan prisons have been directed to travel to the United States alongside Venezuelan intelligence officers to track down former Venezuelan military members, politicians, and...

* Former CIA official accuses govt of ignoring warnings of post-invasion violence in Iraq WASHINGTON: A former CIA official who coordinated US intelligence on the Middle East has accused the Bush administration of “cherry-picking” intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, The Washington Post reported Friday. The newspaper said Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also accused the administration of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein....

If someone uses big words to sound smart, they’re probably not. If someone speaks in clichés, they might be lacking original thought. Understanding human communication isn’t always simple. In fact, navigating the labyrinth of human conversation requires more than just a good ear. It also requires an understanding of certain speech patterns and phrases. Now, some folks have a knack for this. They can hear a few words and immediately gauge the intelligence of the speaker. In this article, let’s delve into 8 phrases that, more often than not, are used by people with below-average intelligence in everyday conversation.

What if stupidity isn’t about intelligence at all, but about surrendering the will to think? In this chilling and timely video essay, we explore Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity — a terrifying insight into how smart, well-meaning people can become blind instruments of destruction. Drawing on Bonhoeffer’s life, the psychology of conformity, Milgram’s obedience experiments, social media echo chambers, and the rise of AI-driven misinformation, we reveal why stupidity isn't a lack of intellect — it's a surrender of critical thought. 👉 Why do intelligent people support dangerous ideas? 👉 How does groupthink override personal judgment? 👉 What does it...

Anthropic said its latest artificial intelligence model resorted to blackmail when told it would be taken offline. In a safety test, the AI company asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant to a fictional company, but then gave it access to (also fictional) emails saying that it would be replaced, and also that the engineer behind the decision was cheating on his wife. Anthropic said the model “[threatened] to reveal the affair” if the replacement went ahead. AI thinkers such as Geoff Hinton have long worried that advanced AI would manipulate humans in order to achieve its goals....

Have you ever just had a family dinner conversation over a group holiday or spoken with friends about going to Ibiza to party, and minutes later, relevant ads appear on Facebook or other applications or websites? More than likely you answered yes, and that’s simply because all smart devices are permanently listening in on everything you say and keep track of everything you do. They are constantly gathering behavioural data, mostly for commercial and marketing purposes. In the case of vehicles with built-in smart devices, including sensors, they build complete profiles of the drivers and their passengers. They map their...

U.S. intelligence chiefs ordered agencies to tighten surveillance on Greenland, the first tangible step toward President Donald Trump’s oft-stated goal of bringing the Arctic island under American control, sources leaked to The Wall Street Journal. The directive instructed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Administration (NSA) and the CIA to identify Greenlandic and Danish figures who might back U.S. objectives and to gauge public sentiment toward American resource extraction, the outlet reported Tuesday. Its emergence triggered immediate pushback from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who accused unnamed officials of leaking in order to thwart the administration. “The Wall...

For as long as there has been war, there has been a need to reveal what the enemy is planning. This was no less true in ancient Greece where generals and statesmen relied on espionage to reveal the intentions and capabilities of their adversaries. The philosopher Plato believed that the ancient Greek states were in a constant state of war, whether declared or undeclared. It was within this grey zone that the subtleties of espionage took place, a dimension of foreign affairs that remains true to this day. Like the practice of spying itself, the sources regarding espionage in ancient...

The big names in artificial intelligence—leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others—still confidently predict that AI attaining human-level smarts is right around the corner. But the naysayers are growing in number and volume. AI, they say, just doesn’t think like us. The work of these researchers suggests there’s something fundamentally limiting about the underlying architecture of today’s AI models. Today’s AIs are able to simulate intelligence by, in essence, learning an enormous number of rules of thumb, which they selectively apply to all the information they encounter. This contrasts with the many ways that humans and even animals are able...

I confess to being a troglodyte or cave man or idiot or whatever metaphor you'd like to use but I'm very skeptical of AI...

Ambassador Charles W. "Chas" Freeman Jr.'s nomination as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) has quickly become the Obama administration's most controversial appointment to date. Mr. Freeman's two post-government activities involved being a de facto employee of Saudi Arabia. In exchange, he received lavish support for his Middle East Policy Center (MEPC) and lucrative contracts for the consulting firm he founded to guide international companies into finding royal family-connected partners within the Saudi elite. This raises the reasonable questions as to whether Ambassador Freeman acted as an unregistered Saudi agent. This role has created significant concern about his impartiality...

Newly declassified documents show informant Stefan Halper was motivated in part by "monetary compensation" and was paid nearly $1.2 million from FBI over three decades. ********************************************************************** Akey FBI informant in the widely-debunked Russia collusion case was paid nearly $1.2 million over three decades, was motivated in part by "monetary compensation," and continued snitching even after agents concluded he told them an inaccurate story about future Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, newly declassified documents show. The nearly 700 pages of once-secret documents, obtained by Just the News, were recently turned over by FBI Director Kash Patel to House Judiciary Committee...