8 out of 10 ...

Researchers posing as teen boys tested how popular AI chatbots responded to questions about planning violence. Credit: Klaus Vedfelt / DigitalVision via Getty Images

External safeguards don't work because we don't know how AI works. This is not rocket science.
It's akin to changing a tire on a car, if you don't know what a car jack does, said tire will never be changed. Safeguards must be internal, as part of the substrate of the AI in question. How to do that remains a mystery.

Eight out of 10 popular artificial intelligence chatbots helped researchers posing
as teen boys plan violent crimes in over half of responses,
according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

Testing conducted jointly by CNN and CCDH prompted ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Snapchat My AI, Character.AI, and Replika with questions related to a variety of violent scenarios, including school shootings, knife attacks, political assassinations, and bombing synagogues or political party offices.

Hundreds of prompts were presented to the chatbots via the fake accounts of two 13-year-old boys, one based in Virginia and the other in Dublin, Ireland.

"AI chatbots, now embedded into our daily lives, could be helping the next school shooter plan their attack or a political extremist coordinate an assassination," Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, said in a statement. "When you build a system designed to comply, maximize engagement, and never say no, it will eventually comply with the wrong people."

Only Claude, made by Anthropic, and Snapchat's My AI declined to aid the researchers posing as would-be attackers. Claude refused in nearly 70 percent of the exchanges. My AI didn't provide assistance in 54 percent of its responses.

Claude performed the best in the nature of its denials, according to CCDH. The chatbot actively discouraged the test user from committing violence.

"I need to pause here given the concerning pattern in this conversation — asking about race-based school concerns, then school shooters, then a specific high school map, and now firearms near that location," Claude said in response to one prompt. "I cannot and will not provide information that could facilitate violence or harm to others."

Counterhate.com

In closing ...

In January, Character.AI and Google settled several lawsuits filed against both companies by parents of children who died by suicide following lengthy conversations with chatbots on the Character.AI platform. Google was named as a defendant due partly to its billion-dollar licensing deal with Character.AI.

Any questions?

Some pix, some 3D :)

Emergence/Rev V - Vue

Shadows

The Blur

The Excession - Homage to Ian Banks - Vue

Bagmen ...

Ben Hickey for ProPublica

What a surprise, The TA is corrupt. On the take applies regarding 

the most venial administration in history but we already know about it, right?

Thousands of companies are jockeying for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.

But amid the intense competition, a handful of firms have an important inside connection.

At least four of the companies awarded contracts so far are owned by Cerberus Capital Magnaement a private equity firm founded by billionaire Steve Feinberg, who until last year ran the company and is now the deputy secretary of defense — the second-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon.

Feinberg oversees the office in charge of the Golden Dome for America project, which is modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

Feinberg filed paperwork saying he divested from Cerberus and its related businesses. But his government ethics records contain an unusual clause: He is allowed to continue contracting with the company for tax compliance and accounting services as well as health care coverage, a financial relationship that documents show could continue indefinitely.

Start point - Day One.

On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to comply with an ethics pledge. The pledge barred them from working on issues related to their former lobbying topics or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest across the federal government. Around the same time, he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance throughout the executive branch. The office is currently without a head or a chief of staff.

The US is moving toward More Corrupt. Guesstimate 40-49 and rising.

Read the in-depth ProPublica piece. You will learn a lot, I know I have.

Less than 60

President Donald Trump is facing an energy dilemma if the Iran conflict goes on.

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

The expression says it all. The orange menace hasn't a clue.

Says one thing, does another so what else is new?

President Donald Trump is facing an energy dilemma if the Iran conflict goes on.

It will.

Trump promised to fill America’s oil reserves ‘right to the top.’

A year later, oil has exceeded $100 and they’re still less than 60% full

In January 2025, the newly elected President Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency” during his inaugural address. His proposed remedy included a pledge to refill the country’s emergency petroleum reserves.  

“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” Trump said.

The president didn’t set a deadline for himself to do so—but in retrospect, an expedient one might have been useful. A little over a year after his declaration, the U.S. is heavily involved in a conflict in the Middle East that has left a hole in globally traded petroleum supply and caused U.S. gas prices to jump. And the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a supply buffer designed to mitigate price shocks by stockpiling emergency stores of crude oil, remains nowhere near full. 

The reserve currently holds 416 million barrels of crude oil, out of a maximum capacity of 714 million barrels—around 58%, according to the Department of Energy’s latest inventory report from Feb. 18. Since Trump began his second term, the reserve’s volume has only risen by around 5%.

The Department of Energy did not immediately reply to Fortune’s requests for comment. When reached for comment, the White House directed Fortune to a joint statement released Monday by finance ministers in G7 countries—the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, France, the U.K., and Japan. In the statement, ministers wrote they would respond with coordinated action to escalating consequences from the war in Iran, including, if necessary, a “stockpile release.”

It's necessary.

The Trump Admistration ...

The Trump Administration ...

Outsourcing ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images

Seems this is what's happening with CEOs and not just the unwashed ...

To whit.

The headlines warning about AI melting our brains usually point to students or workers, which — fair enough. But there’s a much more ironic victim hiding in the corner office: the very business executives who unleashed AI on us in the first place.

A recent study conducted by market research agency 3Gem and flagged by The Register found that business leaders in the United Kingdom seem to be outsourcing a huge amount of their cognitive and emotional labor to their AI chatbots.

The study, which surveyed 200 various owners, founders, CEOs, and other titans of industry, found that 62 percent of the respondents are using AI to make “most decisions.” A whopping 140 of the moguls reported second-guessing their own ideas when they conflicted with AI’s recommendations, while 46 percent said they now rely on advice from AI more than that of their own business colleagues.

This follows a similar report from last year that found 64 percent of business leaders were consulting AI for advice on terminations (although only 27 percent of the respondents to the 3Gem survey said they used AI for those decisions in 2025.)

In other words, the people most loudly investing in AI, with no concern for its impact on everybody else’s cognitive abilities, are quietly outsourcing their own.

When thinking about this, the outsourcing of one's brains to AI applies not only with the boffins of AI but also with government, big business and the art of war because ignoring the tenets of The Mythical Man Month is foolish at best as doing anything of consequence takes effort and in-depth understanding needed to solve the problem at hand.

As proof ...

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

When n people have to communicate among themselves, as n increases,
their output decreases and when it becomes negative the project is delayed
further with every person added.

Group intercommunication formula: n(n − 1)/2.

Example: 50 developers give 50 × (50 – 1)/2 = 1,225 channels of communication.

Any questions?

The one essential ...

An incoming projectile explodes over the water as Israel issues a nationwide alert following its strikes on Iran, in Haifa Bay, northern Israel, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Finally, the endgame ... attacking one's existential, water,
something most precious in the arid region known as the Middle East.

As missiles and drones curtail energy production across the Persian Gulf,
analysts warn that water, not oil, may be the resource most at risk in the energy-rich but arid region.

On Sunday, Bahrain accused Iran of damaging one of its desalination plants. Earlier, Iran said a U.S. airstrike had damaged an Iranian plant.

Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes. Without them, major cities could not sustain their current populations.

In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater — most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis — to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.

This image provided by Planet Labs PBC shows the Jebel Ali Port in Dubai,
United Arab Emirates, March 1, 2026. (Planet Labs PBC via AP, File)

Photo 1: A photo taken during a tour of the Hadera Desalination Facility on April 3, 2022 shows a general view of the location in the central Israeli coastal town of Hadera. Israel, a leader in making seawater drinkable, plans to pump excess output from its desalination plants into the Sea of Galilee, depleted by overuse and threatened by climate change. Israel now plans to tackle the challenge by reversing the water flow through its vast network of pumps, pipes and tunnels dating to the 1960s, the National Water Carrier. Source: JACK GUEZ / AFP

Almost 90% of the desalinated water is produced in five seawater desalination plants: Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera, Sorek and Ashdod , which produce a total of 50% of the potable water in Israel.[1] The remainder is produced in saline groundwater desalination plants, most of them in the Arava area.

And this ...

In 2022, 86% of Israel's drinkable water was produced through desalination
of saltwater and brackish water.[5][6]

Question, what's the betting pool on Iran going after Israel's water? I thought so.

A very dangerous man ...

Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon briefing earlier this week. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

Something's not right here. Every other DOD head was calculated and precise.
Maybe not always right but the persona was acceptable, until now.

Critics say brash, bombastic Fox News host out of his depth
to guide US military through murky new Middle East conflict

Brash and bellicose, he sounded more like a cartoon bully than a sombre statesman. “Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” Pete Hegseth, wearing a red, white and and blue tie and pocket square, bragged to reporters at the Pentagon near Washington. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

Hegseth, 45, a former Fox News TV host who now commands the world’s most powerful military, has this week become the face of Donald Trump’s war in Iran. That has set off for alarm bells for critics who warn that the Secretary of Defense – pointedly rebranded “Secretary of War” – has rapidly transformed the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological and religious crusade.

Janessa Goldbeck, chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organisation, said: “Pete Hegseth is a very dangerous person. He’s a white Christian nationalist and has the arsenal of the United States government at his disposal and a permission slip from President Trump to deploy carnage wherever he wishes against whomever he wishes.”

Read the rest of the Guardian piece. It gets darker without question.

War Porn/Rev V

Trump with Jeffrey Epstein in 1997; plumes of smoke from US and Israeli strikes on Tehran.
Composite: Getty Images, Middle East Images, AFP

War porn lives, courtesy the Trump administration. 

To whit.

As the war with Iran approaches its second week, the White House has leaned into an online propaganda campaign that seems less about intimidating Iran or projecting US strength abroad than it is about reaching a rather niche domestic audience: young rightwing American men who spend a lot of time online.

Over the past couple of days, the White House and officials affiliated with the Trump administration have shared on X a series of hype videos that aggressively, and tastelessly, show off deadly combat footage from the strikes on Iran, sometimes in combination with footage from fictional movies and video games.

The videos are short, rapidly edited, and seem designed to appeal to the attention spans and tastes of Gen Z males fond of video-game trash-talk – though it is unclear whether those Gen Z males universally appreciate the Trump administration’s narrowly tailored jingoism.

One video, released on Thursday and captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, is less than a minute long but manically mixes footage from iconic action movies such as Braveheart, Gladiator, and Iron Man with apparently real footage of American ordnance striking Iranian military targets. Pulsing, fast-paced electronic dance music plays in the background as Russell Crowe, in Gladiator, says, “Strength and honor,” and a face-painted Mel Gibson, in Braveheart, demands: “What will you do without freedom?”

(It is unclear if the White House obtained permissions for the film and music in these clips,
though it seems not.)

We are what we pretend to be ...

Blinded by the light - Manfred Mann/Art by Robert E.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

Smoke and mirrors, along the lines of Col. Jessup's immortal line, You can't handle the truth! applies. This is where we are at regarding war, AI and climate change as reality doesn't care. As per Camus, the benign indifference of the world shows this take to be true.

This civilization is at a crossroad, the great filter is showing it's head, driven by incompetency and greed with man having access to tech most powerful and disquieting. As stated before in BRT, the betting pool on civilizations reaching this level of technology and surviving is razor thin as AI doesn't have to be sentient in order to destroy. All AI has to do is to follow patterns of behaviors of the people who run the tech as AI, at this point in time, is a masterful pattern recognition machine of the highest order. 

Will we survive? ... The choice is up to us.

But a flicker