There’s no sympathy for Bob Menendez at all; however, all things considered, he was convicted of doing the same thing that every Senator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee does, and the same thing that Joe Biden did for decades… Sell the influence of their office to foreign countries. They all do it.
The difference with Senator Bob Menendez was only that he was so open about doing it, and he dropped all the pretenses that usually provide the plausible deniability factor. Today the judge sentenced him to 11-years in federal prison.
One AI, called Truth Terminal, has recently made the news by becoming the first AI millionaire by promoting crypto currencies it was gifted. While not fully autonomous yet, it’s quite likely by later this year, some AI agents—not dissimilar from viruses—will be able to independently wander the internet, causing significant change in the real world.
AI could have huge ramifications for the financial world. Let’s examine one wild scenario—which I call the AI Monetary Hegemony—something that could possibly already happen in 2025.
A fully autonomous AI agent is programmed to go on to the internet and create cryptocurrency wallets, then create crypto currencies, then endlessly create millions of similar versions of itself that want to trade that crypto.
Now let’s assume all these AIs are programmed to try to indefinitely increase the value of their crypto, something they accomplish in similar ways humans do—by promotion and then trading their cryptos for higher values. Additionally, the autonomous AIs open their crypto to be traded with humans, creating a functioning market on the blockchain for all.
This plan sounds beneficial for all parties, even if people decry that the AI created-crypto currencies are essentially just Ponzi schemes. But they’re not Ponzi schemes because there is an endless supply of AIs always newly appearing to buy and trade more crypto.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize the AIs endlessly replicating and acting like this could quickly amass far more digital wealth than all humanity possesses.
The White House issued a memo Tuesday offering to pay federal workers who don’t want to return to the office through Sept. 30, as long as they resign by Feb. 6.
Why it matters: The action, first reported by Axios, marks an acceleration in President Trump’s already unprecedented purge of the federal workforce.
Driving the news: The Office of Personnel Management described the offer as administrative leave with pay and benefits.
More information was shared by OPM later on Tuesday online in a memo titled, “A Fork in the Road.”
State of play: Employees who wish to resign were told: “1) Select “Reply” to this email. You must reply from your government account. A reply from an account other than your .gov or .mil account will not be accepted. 2)Type the word “Resign” into the body of this reply email. Hit “Send.”
The subject line, and some of the wording, echoed an email Elon Musk sent to Twitter employees in 2022 giving them a similar ultimatum: to either leave, or stay and become “hardcore,” The Verge points out.
Musk himself appeared to acknowledge this in a post on X Tuesday evening.
Zoom in: “The government-wide email being sent today is to make sure that all federal workers are on board with the new administration’s plan to have federal employees in office and adhering to higher standards. We’re five years past COVID and just 6 percent of federal employees work full-time in office. That is unacceptable,” a senior administration official tells Axios.
The White House expects 5% to 10% of federal employees to accept the offer, which would potentially mean hundreds of thousands of people.
The administration projects the buyouts could ultimately save taxpayers up to $100 billion a year.
The offer applies to all full-time federal employees, except for military personnel, the Postal Service, and those working in immigration enforcement or national security.
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.
A shooting that left a Vermont border patrol agent dead may be connected to several other murders spanning from Pennsylvania to California.
Swanton Sector Border Patrol agent David Maland, 44, was killed when the occupants of a car started firing at him when he stopped them about 20 miles from the US-Canada border on January 20.
The suspected shooters have been identified as Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington and Felix Bauckholt – a German national who was shot dead at the scene.
Youngblut was injured during the shootout and taken to the hospital. Maland was also taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The motives behind the incident remain unclear.
But prosecutors believe the Vermont shooting was not an isolated crime – tying Youngblut to a double homicide in Pennsylvania and a fatal stabbing in California.
In November 2024, Youngblut filed an application to marry Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
On Friday, Snyder was arrested and charged with murdering a Vallejo, California landlord named Curtis Lind, 82, on January 17. He appeared in court on Tuesday.
A criminal complaint filed in Solano County claims that Lind was stabbed and killed ‘for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding,’ KTVU reported.
There is a lot of talk about both perps being members of a ‘trans cult’. As reliable info on that angle appears, I’ll post it. There has been plenty of evidence that some trans people begin with psychological body dysphoria which is ‘affirmed’ by dishonest professionals and aggravated by opposite-sex hormone treatments and surgery. Hence, the deranged violent outcomes, including suicide. ABN
Thousands of ICE officers have been dispatched to the San Diego border crossing as they prepare to take ‘100,000 immigrants’ back to Mexico and Central America in one of the biggest migrant raids in recent times.
Around 1,500 active duty troops were deployed to the nearly 2,000-mile border this week, including 500 Marines from Camp Pendleton in California.
DailyMail.com can now reveal that they have been joined with what has been described as a ‘mile long line of DHS trucks and CBP’.
A White House intelligence source said: ‘There is a ‘mile long line of DHS trucks and CBP in front of Camp Pendleton right now, ready to do the biggest illegal immigrant grab in recent history.
‘The West Coast is this week and the East Coast is next week. It is about to get crazy in California. They need to fill 100,000 spots’, meaning arrests is the directive.
The source continued: ‘They are going to be taking 100,000 immigrants back to Mexico, Columbia, El Salvador and Guatemala in this grab.’
Border czar Tom Homan says he is not satisfied with the pace of migrant deportations – despite ICE’s ‘unprecedented’ number of arrests – and claims the US needs to ‘open the aperture up’ and carry out ‘more deportations’.
This is the most important thing most people who have a decent grasp of the ponerology of Jewish supremacy do not understand. The violence is hidden because it is done in secret with poison, psychosurgery, sensory damage. And it is largely aimed at boys and young men. The dude you know who went off the rails for whatever reason people give, actually went off the rails because he was poisoned. The betacuck who is mayor of your city was not born a betacuck; he was lobotomized when he was fifteen. How extensive are these attacks? My conclusion is it is happening across the entire West at levels greater than the fentanyl or opioid crises, which are part of the same onslaught. It has been going on for many decades; see the above. Once Jewish supremists gained absolute power in Russia, they mass murdered Russians and Christians on scales never seen before in this world. We are today watching a smaller version of that in Gaza and now the West Bank. Why does Trump go along with it? KOBK; he has no choice. The entire elite level of Western leadership is tied up in this. I believe many of them know what is happening but do not know how to deal with it. I believe this because I have spoken with some of them. ABN
American Buddhist Net 