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Is ‘vibe physics’ the future?

At the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Denver, a session on “Navigating the AI revolution: future-proofing your science career” drew in a crowd of early-stage physicists searching for practical career advice. What they received was much more philosophical in nature.

Malachi Schram of the Pacific Northwest National Lab and Hilary Egan of the National Laboratory of the Rockies delivered back-to-back talks full of similar rhetoric, emphasizing the fast-paced development of AI used for specialized tasks in science, such as detecting equipment failure or identifying ways of retrofitting older buildings.

But the third speaker, Matthew Schwartz, a theoretical physicist from Harvard University, took his optimism about AI far further. In a punchy presentation, he predicted that large language models (LLMs) will surpass human intelligence in five years.

“There’s definitely exponential growth of the intellectual capacity of these [large language] models as a function of time,” Schwartz told the audience, using the number of model parameters as a proxy for intelligence. “The machines are still growing by roughly 10 times each year, and we” – he paused for dramatic effect – “are not growing much smarter.” This drew a wave of laughter from the crowd.

Unlike humans, machines can visualize higher dimensional spaces, hold far more information in memory and process more complex equations. “We are not the endpoint of intelligence. We are only the smartest things to evolve on Earth so far,” Schwartz argued. He went on to suggest that humans may simply be incapable of understanding long-standing physics problems such as a theory of everything. He compared it to cats, which he suggested will never understand chess.

If the talent of physicists exists on a bell curve, Schwartz claims we can push the bell curve higher on the talent axis: “If we use AI augmentation, we can get 10 000 Einsteins a century instead of one Einstein.”

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Trump is strategizing means to seize Iran’s nuclear stockpiles, sources say

The Trump administration has been strategizing methods and options to secure or extract Iran’s nuclear materials, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions, as a U.S.-Israel-led military campaign against Tehran enters a more uncertain phase. 

The timing of any such an operation — if President Trump were to order it — remained unclear Friday night. One source said he has made no decision yet. 

But planning has centered on the possible deployment of forces from the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, the elite military unit often tasked with the most sensitive counter-proliferation missions, two of the sources told CBS News. 

A White House spokeswoman said it’s the Pentagon’s job to make preparations.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon didn’t immediately comment. 

Mr. Trump in a Truth Social post Friday evening said: “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran.”

The private deliberations on the nuclear material come amid an evolving conflict that in its opening focused on degrading Iran’s conventional military capabilities — including air defenses, missile systems and key infrastructure tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

That initial wave of strikes carried out by U.S. and Israeli forces was intended to blunt Iran’s ability to retaliate across the region. However, despite the onslaught from the air, Iran has been able to counterstrike on Israel and U.S.-allied countries in the Gulf region, and has halted most oil shipments by threatening ships. 

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Mystery of Kurt Cobain’s death deepens as new handwriting analysis points to forged suicide note found at the scene

A suicide note impaled with a red pen into the soil of a potted plant was long believed to be Kurt Cobain’s final message to the world. 

The Nirvana frontman died on April 5, 1994, at age 27 from a shotgun wound at his Seattle home. The King County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide.

Written in red pen on a restaurant placemat, the note was one of the key pieces of evidence cited by Seattle Police in their conclusion that Cobain took his own life.

Now, a private forensic team has claimed that the final lines of the note, where Cobain appears to bid farewell to his wife and daughter, may have been written by someone else.

Those lines read: ‘Please keep going Courtney,’ ‘for Frances,’ ‘for her life which will be so much happier,’ ‘without me,’ followed by ‘I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.’

Independent researcher Michelle Wilkins, who worked with the team, told Daily Mail: ‘If you look closely, the handwriting in the last four lines is different, larger and more scrawled. We don’t believe Kurt wrote those lines.’

By contrast, the top of the note, addressed to Cobain’s imaginary childhood friend ‘Boddah,’ reads like a farewell to the music world rather than a personal message to his family: ‘I’ve tried everything… I’ve tried to get what I wanted out of life, and it just hasn’t worked.’

Handwriting analyst Mozelle Martin claimed that the last lines were written by someone else, citing changes in letter formation and rhythm, though her findings have not been peer-reviewed. 

Martin said she conducted her analysis to see the Kurt Cobain case officially reopened by Seattle Police as a homicide investigation, not a suicide.

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UK: Transgender Pedophile Spared Prison After Being Caught With Sexual Abuse Images Of Children As Young As 6

A trans-identified male who was caught with images of young children being sexually abused has walked free from court after being given a community order. Tyler “Kairah” Kelly, 25, was formerly promoted as a happy “trans kid” by British media.

Kelly, of central Middlesborough, was initially arrested following a raid on his home in January. The investigation was reportedly sparked by a tip sent to police indicating that Kelly was in possession of illegal material. At the time of his arrest, two phones were seized from his home, with illegal material being found on one of them. According to Teeside Live, at least one of the images depicted a 6-year-old boy being sexually abused.

Kelly later pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images and possessing a prohibited image of a child.

During the trial, Kelly’s defense attorney, Robert Mochrie, said that his client has had a “difficult life due to gender dysphoria,” and lamented the “social isolation she has endured during her early years.” Mochrie described his client as a “prime candidate for rehabilitation.”

The court agreed, and handed Kelly a two-year community order, along with an order to attend a mental health treatment program for six months; an alcohol abstinence program for 120 days; and attend 20 rehabilitation days. Kelly was also made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order for the next five years, which restricts his use of the internet and allows police to search his devices at any time.

Kelly’s arrest holds particular significance, as just 10 years ago he was sympathetically profiled by media for being a “trans teen.”

In a 2016 Metro article, Kelly, who was 15 years old at the time, was described as “a Kim K-lookalike.” The article notes that Kelly began formally identifying as transgender over a school break, leaving as Tyler and returning as “Kairah.”

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White House AI Framework Pushes Age Verification ID Mandate

The White House has published a National AI Legislative Framework, a set of recommendations to Congress intended to govern artificial intelligence with a single uniform standard rather than, as the document puts it, “a patchwork of conflicting state laws.”

The administration wants federal law to preempt the states. That part is straightforward. What the framework actually proposes is less straightforward.

Alongside a genuine free speech provision, the document contains age verification mandates, chat surveillance requirements, national security carve-outs that would tighten the relationship between AI companies and federal intelligence agencies, and an expansion of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a law that we have already flagged for lacking adequate safeguards against censorship.

The White House is presenting all of this as part of the same coherent package.

Start with the child protection section: Congress should establish “commercially reasonable, privacy protective, age-assurance requirements (such as parental attestation) for AI platforms and services likely to be accessed by minors.” Age verification on AI platforms. The framework calls these requirements “privacy protective.”  They are not.

There is no version of meaningful age verification that doesn’t require collecting sensitive personal data, and there is no version of collecting sensitive personal data at scale that isn’t a breach waiting to happen.

The only tools platforms have are identity-based checks, government IDs, biometric scans, credit card data, and third-party verification services, or biometric estimation.

The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are.

In October 2025, Discord identified 70,000 users globally who potentially had their photo IDs exposed to hackers.

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Eric Swalwell “Nannygate” Explodes: DHS and FEC Complaints Allege Illegal Alien Employment and Misuse of Campaign Funds for Childcare

On February 16, 2026, I filed two well-documented federal complaints against Congressman Eric Swalwell, one with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS/ICE), and another with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Together, these filings raise serious questions about whether Swalwell engaged in illegal patterns of conduct that reflect his disregard for federal law and a potential abuse of campaign funds for personal benefit.

At issue are two distinct but closely related allegations: first, that Swalwell continued employing a foreign national nanny illegally for two years after her legal work authorization expired; and second, that he illegally used campaign funds to cover what appear to be ongoing personal childcare expenses totaling more than $300,000.

Taken together, these allegations suggest a sustained pattern in which legal requirements were well understood by Swalwell, and then ignored for personal gain. I published both complaints on SwalwellisDisqualified.com.

The DHS/ICE Complaint: Alleged Employment of an Unauthorized Worker

In 2022, Eric Swalwell and his wife employed a Brazilian national, Amanda Barbosa, as a live-in Au Pair under the J-1 visa program. Barbosa resided in the Swalwell household and provided full-time childcare for their three young children. In 2022, Barbosa was paid approximately $46,929.70 for her services by Swalwell’s campaign under “Childcare for Campaign Events”.

Critically, Barbosa’s J-1 visa, and thus her legal authorization to work, expired at the end of December 2022. The Swalwells were fully aware of this deadline. In fact, earlier in 2022, they attempted to secure permanent work authorization for Barbosa by filing a federal labor certification (ETA-9089), which required a formal job posting in The Washington Post. Their advertisement outlined a demanding, full-time nanny position which included:

  • taking care of 3 kids & help satisfy kids’ physical, emotional, intellectual, & social needs
  • assist w/care of dog, organize kids’ play activities, drive kids to appts & activities
  • household cleaning &laundry, prep kids’ meals, Mon to Fri, 7A to 4P, Wknd work time

The Swalwell’s permanent work authorization application was denied by the Department of Labor.

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How Will Corporate Lobbyists Fix Healthcare? Don’t Ask—Because You Can’t

Corporate media political reporting has always been a clubby endeavor, but a recent reporting experience suggests that the insider culture in Washington, DC, is more insular than ever.

It’s often a challenge for independent media to get responses from Washington insider sources—especially on stories critical of powerful actors—but it’s become increasingly difficult even to pose the questions to those sources. Corporate news sources now issue press releases without bothering to include any information about who to contact with follow-up questions, as if the source is handing the truth down from on high.

When I first encountered this phenomenon after returning to journalism three years ago, I assumed it was a function of the laziness and/or incompetence of individual PR hacks. In my previous life, I had written a few dozen press releases, and “who’s the contact person?” was always a key question to answer in planning media outreach. But today, a failure to offer contact information increasingly appears to be a deliberate strategy to stymie journalistic inquiry.

‘No Surprises’ unsurprising fiasco

Last November, my healthcare politics online newsletter, Healing and Stealing (11/7/25), published an investigation of a national coalition of health insurers and other big businesses. The Coalition Against Surprise Medical Billing includes major business lobbying trade associations like the National Retail Federation, National Restaurant Association, National Association of Manufacturers and the health insurance industry trade group AHIP. Through those associations and business/labor health policy alliances, most of the largest employers in the US and many major labor unions are part of the Coalition, in alliance with the health insurance companies that sell them health plans for their employees.

The Coalition lobbied for passage of the No Surprises Act. The law, passed in December 2020 and signed by President Donald Trump, limits the amount that patients have to pay out of pocket when they unknowingly see a doctor or use another service that is not covered in their health insurance plan’s network. The law also set up a new arbitration system to resolve disputes—between employers and insurers on one side, and hospitals, labs, doctors’ offices and ambulance companies on the other—over the rest of the bills.

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It’s Not Anarcho-Tyranny, It’s Interventionist Non-Intervention

In 1994, Sam Francis originally coined a term: “anarcho-tyranny.” He described this phenomenon as “the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”

In a previous article (and in an forthcoming paper), utilizing Rothbard’s typology of intervention, it was argued that the state—following coercive taxation and monopolization or competition suppression—can intervene through doing “nothing,” that is, paid non-delivery of promised and monopolized service. The core elements of interventionist non-intervention include 1) the binary intervention of coercive taxation where citizens are forced to pay for a service regardless of whether or not they receive it; 2) the triangular interventions of monopolization or competition suppression where the state claims exclusive domain over the service provision; and, 3) non-delivery wherein the state then fails or refuses to provide the monopolized service for which it has extracted payment. These three are the minimum requirements for interventionist non-intervention. Additionally, intensifying elements may be added, which include prohibition of self-help alternatives, the maintenance of the coercive framework, and legal immunity from consequences of non-delivery.

Interventionist non-interventionism combines these elements to create something qualitatively different from other forms of government failure or intervention. This is not deregulation, in which all regulatory and coercive elements are removed; it is not privatization, since the state maintains its monopoly; it is not austerity, since the revenue extraction continues; and it is not anarchy, since the state actively prevents voluntary order. In this way, non-delivery—the state doing “nothing”—also becomes a coercive intervention. The specific combination of extraction, monopolization, and non-delivery creates systematic harm while preventing solutions.

While there is overlap with the concept of “anarcho-tyranny,” there is an important distinction between anarcho-tyranny and interventionist non-intervention. The concept of anarcho-tyranny implies in the first part of the term—anarchy—a total absence of government involvement, however, that is often not the case. It is not that there is pure anarchy—absence of government—allowed in selective cases and tyranny in other cases, but rather that the “anarchy” (disorder) described by anarcho-tyranny is state-imposed disorder. This chaos and disorder (termed “anarcy”) happens within, and largely because of, the state system, not independent of it.

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Pete Hegseth’s War on Journalists (and Iran Too)

Last fall, nearly the entire Pentagon press corps was banned from the Pentagon after refusing to sign Pete Hegseth’s loyalty oath, which would have bound them to only report information “authorized” by the government (FAIR.org, 9/23/25). They were quickly replaced by pundits from Hegseth-approved outlets like One America News, Gateway Pundit and Lindell TV, which is “Pillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s pet project.

But once the Iran War got underway, it dawned on Hegseth that a Defense secretary needs to communicate with the whole country, not just the narrow slice of it reached by his favorite right-wing pundits. So Hegseth reversed course, asking the major networks to bring their cameras back to the Pentagon. They agreed, but on one condition: Some of their reporters had to be allowed to return to the press briefing room, too.

So back they came, albeit now at the back of the room. Few of these reporters—who represent outlets you’ve actually heard of, like ABC, NBC and the New York Times—are called on. Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, instead fields questions almost exclusively from handpicked media personalities seated in the front rows. (I’d call them reporters, but if they signed Hegseth’s 2025 oath, as most did, they’re anything but.)

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CNN Continues Lying About Child In ‘Bunny Hat’ Who Was ‘Detained’ By ICE

Even as the White House naively attempts to placate Democrats by adopting a softer tone on deportations, the media are lying about immigration law enforcement as fiercely as ever.

CNN on Friday promoted an online streaming special centered on migrant children by referring back to 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, the Ecuadorian child temporarily allowed into the U.S. with his parents by the reckless Biden administration. An immigration judge recently denied Ramos’ family’s asylum claim, meaning they’re cleared for removal. That’s another way of saying the case has been adjudicated and it’s time for Liam to go home. But CNN anchor Sara Sidner instead chose to lie about the circumstances of that whole episode.

“Do you remember this image?” she said with a photo of Ramos on screen. “It became the haunting face of a Minneapolis immigration crackdown that left that community reeling. It shows 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos with his Spiderman backpack and bunny hat being detained by an ICE agent while his mom is feet away inside their home.”

CNN’s poor audience would be led to believe “Little Liam” (as he was referred to by another anchor later in the day) was playing in the crisp white snow when a fed snatched him from his unsuspecting parents, ready for immediate deportation, all while his helpless mother stood by crying. That’s not what happened.

In reality, immigration authorities were attempting to detain Liam’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, who was with his son outside their home. The father fled, leaving Liam alone, and when agents tried to unite him with his mother, who was inside, she refused to open the door, effectively leaving the child abandoned, according to the Department of Homeland Security. When the father, Adrian, was eventually captured, he requested that his son go with him to a detention facility, so he did.

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