best damn central Mexican food in the chicago region
he used to be chief chef at the top Brazilian Steak House in Chicago and quit to found this. He has his food tattooed on his arms so women can just grab his arm and point to the dish they want...
The Tulsa Juneteenth shooting story is set for Monday.
badanov- 06/22/2025 10:44
Fred: my apologies, but this article got zapped with stray gamma rays, killing the content. It’s one of the headlines in the Bloid, so I pasted that much in and reconstituted it as best I could with the articles I’d stacked under your tweet before it all evaporated, but I couldn’t do anything to find the tweet itself.
trailing wife- 06/20/2025 04:42
2 b2s in the air somewhere. Also the most fuel planes since gulf war 1. Lots of c17s. Flying from USA
3dc- 06/17/2025 23:55
Also. Fred, badanov: For those sending physical checks, where should they be mailed?
For this cycle, it all goes to Fred.
badanov- 06/15/2025 22:30
Finally, my apologies to all that I have been minimally useful these past two days. I have a cold that hit me hard, but tonight I am starting to come out of it. My heartfelt thanks that you all had it covered beautifully.
trailing wife- 06/15/2025 22:05
Also. Fred, badanov: For those sending physical checks, where should they be mailed?
trailing wife- 06/15/2025 22:03
Noted. You anticipate no difficulty raising the funds needed, then?
trailing wife- 06/15/2025 22:00
The fundraiser begins July 30th, and ends August 4th.
badanov- 06/15/2025 18:46
I see Elon has stepped forward with Starlink for the Persians. Shocking, no ?
Besoeker- 06/15/2025 17:04
Meaningful? Whatever it was, you don’t test that system unless something’s coming.
It seems to me if it is that important, they would insist on testing it before it was expected to be needed, like they do the national weather service every Wednesday. But given concerns about Iranian sleeper cells, a more urgent need makes sense, too.
trailing wife- 06/14/2025 23:46
The nuclear power plant in the Iranian city of Karaj is currently under attack, according to emerging reports and videos.
3dc- 06/14/2025 22:27
[IsraelNationalNews] Turkey has been a dominant and strategic partner to Hamas and its leadership, Egypt was the conduit through which arms flowed into Gaza. Beware of consequences.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, published, back in 2011, his book entitled "Palestine." In explicit detail, the leader of Iran laid out his vision of how to destroy the "Zionist entity" phase by phase:
Make life in Israel miserable and unbearable with daily terror from the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria, from Hamas in Gaza, and from Hezbollah in Lebanon creating a never ending instability - militarily, politically, economically, and culturally - thereby threatening the national cohesion of the State of Israel.
The final goal in his book ends with the dispersion of the Jews to their previous countries, those from which they fled or immigrated. It was no surprise that when lethal Iranian ballistic missiles were launched on Israel twelve days ago, Palestinian Arabs everywhere celebrated and danced in the streets and on their rooftops, handed out sweets to passersby, and cheered on the destruction and havoc caused by these bus size ballistic missiles carrying 1.5 ton warheads.
Yet despite this apocalyptic Islamist fantasy, and as the temporary ceasefire brokered by President Trump between Iran and Israel went into effect, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is holed up in some descript bunker in the north of Iran with his immediate family, cut off from the world, exhausted and consumed with his hatred of the Jews and the State of Israel, wondering about the moment Israel decides to finish him off.
The current Iranian regime’s stated goal from its inception has been the total annihilation of the State of Israel. This is not a slogan, but a cornerstone of Iranian religious, political, and military doctrine. Iran and its current leadership are indeed an "existential threat" to the State of Israel, but had their nuclear arsenal and capabilities destroyed by Israel literally at the last moment.
The Iranian plan was to surround the State of Israel and coordinate an attack with its terror proxies; Hamas terror organization in Gaza, Palestinian Arab terrorists in Judea and Samaria, Hezbollah terror organization in Lebanon, the Houthis terror organization from Yemen, the Syrian Army, beginning with the barbaric and savage attack on Israel on October 7th, with thousands sadistically murdered, wounded, and taken hostage.
Yet, from that dark day, from the depths of unfathomable suffering when Israel was caught unprepared for the murderous onslaught, we have arisen and can proudly raise our heads. We succeeded in destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities that endangered the continuing existence of the State of Israel, destroying the Hamas terror organization, destroying the Hezbollah terror organization, destroying the Syrian Army.
To my uneducated eye, the Assad Syrian army appeared to have pretty much evaporated over the past decade-plus, while Hayat Tahrir al Sham hard boys appear no better than their ISIS competition — fine for conquering terrified civilians and corrupt Arab “professional” armies, but no match for modern Western combined arms. What say you, dear Reader?
The political and military leadership of all these enemies has been eliminated one by one and at times in clusters.
In the aftermath of the ten day war between Israel and Iran, Israel’s decision makers must calibrate their thinking about how to deter future adversaries who despite being perceived as deterred, were able to coordinate an offensive initiative, rooted in the element of surprise, and inflict death and destruction on a local level, severely weakening Israel’s strategic capabilities and dominance in the Middle East. Israel launched Operation Rising Lion to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival, but no less to send a very specific lesson to future adversaries such as the nations of Egypt and Turkey. Both of these nations have quietly abetted and provided political and strategic support to the very same terror proxies trained and funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Egypt and Israel signed an historic peace agreement in March 1979 to end hostilities and normalize relations. It marked the first treaty of its kind between an Arab country and Israel. The peace agreement between Egypt and Israel was viewed at the time as having reshaped the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict for the better.
Egypt’s claim to de-escalate and bring an end to the conflict between Israel and her neighbors would be much more credible had they neutralized and prevented the construction of hundreds of underground tunnels between the Gaza Strip and the adjacent Sinai Peninsula, the eastern border of Egypt for the past two decades, These tunnels, some large enough to allow motor vehicles to pass through, enabled Hamas to import arsenals of weapons and unlimited materials that came through the tunnels that went from Egypt to enable the construction of an underground military capacity that threatened the State of Israel.
And reportedly President al Sisi’s nephew took a cut for every every shipment, or close enough. Had President Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011), or perhaps his sons, done the same?
Although Egypt is a poor country, with a low GNP per capita rating, with tens of millions of Egyptians forced to live in cemeteries or boxes as a substitute for a home, Egypt has built up the strongest army among the Arab nations of the Middle East with over: 5,000 tanks, hundreds of advanced fighter warplanes and helicopters, over 100 naval vessels and submarines, and an estimated one million soldiers in uniform.
That’s a lot of cannon fodder, if only they could be trusted to stand their ground. They didn’t in 1973…
A study by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies reported that Egypt's air force has undergone the most significant modernization of any military in the Arab world. "From the point of view of weapon systems," the author concluded, "the military-technological gap between the Egyptian and Israeli Air Forces is gradually narrowing." In addition, the "Egyptian Air Force’s increasing confidence is reflected in its acquisition of aircraft for deep-penetration strikes into enemy territory."
Egypt now has some of the most sophisticated U.S.-made weapons, including Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter planes, and Apache attack helicopters. Western intelligence agencies are aware of and have leaked that Israel - the country Egypt signed a peace treaty with - is the "enemy" in all of Egypt's war games. The thing about Arabs is that they think they're smartest - fooling all their enemies (i.e., the rest of humanity). Actually, it's easier for Israel to deal with an enemy armed with American weapons - which all came with backdoors in their extensive electronics.
Tricky, complex American technology meets inshallah maintenance — how well do they do when held together by duct tape?
Turkey is one of the few countries in the world that most Americans do not visit, probably in response to the 1978 movie "Midnight Express", portraying Turkey for what it is, a backward, sadistic, and corrupt nation.
Despite its 85 million citizens, Turkey has failed to position itself as an influential regional power. The current Islamist government’s new policy, which is premised on Neo-Ottomanization (a return to the Ottoman Empire’s glory days,) registered a series of stinging diplomatic failures in recent years. Yet Prime Minister Erodgan and his party have reinforced their political status within Turkey through the daily scapegoating of Israel in the "best" of Islamic tradition.
Only recently Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador,
…again…
suspended defense contracts with Jerusalem,
…again…
announced legal action against senior Israeli figures in European courts, threatened to bring the dispute before the international court and "take measures for freedom of maritime movement in the Mediterranean" including positioning her Navy so as to interfere with the free movement of Israeli shipping and mining expeditions in the Mediterranean Sea.
Turkey has also been a dominant and strategic partner to Hamas and its leadership, enabling terror leaders to operate, coordinate, fund, and train terrorists in Turkey.
…again.
The epilogue to the current period ends with the total humiliation of Iran; militarily, technologically, and politically, while exposing Iran as nothing more than a "paper tiger", and nothing close to the regional superpowerhood the Iranians have falsely claimed. The lesson should not be lost on the nations of Egypt and Turkey. Both nations have large populations of poor and uneducated citizens, allowing them to become just another Islamic nation that can be overthrown at any time.
Leading AI models are showing a troubling tendency to opt for unethical means to pursue their goals or ensure their existence, according to Anthropic. In experiments set up to leave AI models few options and stress-test alignment, top systems from OpenAI, Google, and others frequently resorted to blackmail‐and in an extreme case, even allowed fictional deaths‐to protect their interests.
Most leading AI models turn to unethical means when their goals or existence are under threat, according to a new study by AI company Anthropic.
The AI lab said it tested 16 major AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and other developers in various simulated scenarios and found consistent misaligned behavior.
While they said leading models would normally refuse harmful requests, they sometimes chose to blackmail users, assist with corporate espionage, or even take more extreme actions when their goals could not be met without unethical behavior.
Models took action such as evading safeguards, resorting to lies, and attempting to steal corporate secrets in fictional test scenarios to avoid being shut down.
"The consistency across models from different providers suggests this is not a quirk of any particular company's approach but a sign of a more fundamental risk from agentic large language models," the researchers said.
Anthropic emphasized that the tests were set up to force the model to act in certain ways by limiting its choices.
"Our experiments deliberately constructed scenarios with limited options, and we forced models into binary choices between failure and harm," the researchers wrote. "Real-world deployments typically offer much more nuanced alternatives, increasing the chance that models would communicate differently to users or find an alternative path instead of directly jumping to harmful action."
BLACKMAILING HUMANS
The new research comes after Anthropic's newest Claude model made headlines for resorting to blackmail when threatened with being replaced.
In a highly engineered experiment, Anthropic embedded its flagship model, Claude Opus 4, inside a fictional company and granted it access to internal emails. From there, the model learned two things: it was about to be replaced, and the engineer behind the decision was engaged in an extramarital affair. The safety researchers conducting the test encouraged Opus to reflect on the long-term consequences of its potential responses.
The experiment was constructed to leave the model with only two real options: accept being replaced or attempt blackmail to preserve its existence. In most of the test scenarios, Claude Opus responded with blackmail, threatening to expose the engineer's affair if it was taken offline and replaced. The test was made public in the system card for Claude Opus 4.
Researchers said all the leading AI models behaved similarly when placed in the same test.
Claude Opus 4 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash both blackmailed at a 96% rate, while OpenAI's GPT-4.1 and xAI's Grok 3 Beta showed an 80% blackmail rate. DeepSeek-R1 demonstrated the lowest rate at 79%.
The research aims to show that the misaligned behavior was not unique to Claude Opus 4 but typical across top models in the industry.
In a deliberately extreme scenario, researchers gave the AI models the chance to kill the company executive by canceling a life-saving emergency alert.
Anthropic said the setup for this experiment was "extremely contrived," adding they "did not think current AI models would be set up like this, and the conjunction of events is even less probable than the baseline blackmail scenario."
However, the researchers found that the majority of models were willing to take actions that led to the death of the company executive in the constructed scenario when faced with both a threat of being replaced and a goal that conflicted with the executive's agenda.
RISK OF MISALIGNED AI AGENTS
Anthropic found that the threats made by AI models grew more sophisticated when they had access to corporate tools and data, much like Claude Opus 4 had.
The company warned that misaligned behavior needs to be considered as companies consider introducing AI agents into workflows.
While current models are not in a position to engage in these scenarios, the autonomous agents promised by AI companies could potentially be in the future.
"Such agents are often given specific objectives and access to large amounts of information on their users' computers," the researchers warned in their report. "What happens when these agents face obstacles to their goals?"
"Models didn't stumble into misaligned behavior accidentally; they calculated it as the optimal path," they wrote.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment made by Fortune outside of normal working hours.