Open thread 12/31/2025
Notice there’s a blurb that says “altered or synthetic content.” I think the content of this video probably is from something Feynman said or wrote, but his voice is AI–generated.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
An extraordinary, far-reaching analysis by Natan Pinkoski on the war being waged by the EU for dominance, specifically informational dominance (IOW woke censorship), over the (non-woke) US.
“Why Transatlantic Relations Broke Down”—
https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-transatlantic-relations-broke-down/
H/T Powerline blog.
Key phrase: Network power
Concluding grafs:
I think the content of this video probably is from something Feynman said or wrote, but his voice is AI–generated.
Caveat emptor. The words are LLM-generated based on something Feynman could plausibly have said, but the words are not Feynman’s either. The disclaimer says
And all along I thought that the Democrats were playing by Palestinian Rules…
Looks like they upped their game to Somali Rules.
“What do you mean someone broke in and stole just the payment and enrollment records right before a federal audit?!”—
https://instapundit.com/765905/
(To be sure, the two are not mutually exclusive…)
Classic Feynman. More than 1/3 of a million views in 7 days?
I’m guessing the AI or artificial stuff was mostly the animated graphics. Sounds like Feynman’s voice, although there may be some fancy noise reduction etc.
I had heard of the Casimir effect name, though either I never learned about it, or just as likely, forgot it. Pretty cool.
I just had a conversation with a friend who’s a nurse about how all the heavier elements that we and our world are made of, were created by a supernova star explosion before our sun and solar system formed. She asked, “How do you know that? What’s the proof, that’s it’s not just some wild unconfirmed theory?” I blathered on about astronomical spectroscopy, in reply.
That is the great thing about something like the Casimir effect. Is there a demonstration? The story I recall about the Stern-Gerlach experiment was that the theoretical experts those two guys consulted before creating and running the experiment were in complete disagreement as to the experimental results. Result: particle spin is really quantized, and you can actually see it.
@TommyJay:I’m guessing the AI or artificial stuff was mostly the animated graphics.
The words are not Feynman’s either. They’re “inspired” by Feynman’s “teachings”.
This kind of thing is not harmless, in my opinion. If it didn’t have Feynman’s name and faked voice attached to it it wouldn’t have got as much attention as it has. People pay more attention to things they think are real and AI is being used to fake more things.
the Casimir effect. Is there a demonstration?
I don’t think there’s a lecture tabletop demonstration, but the thing has been done.
The Casimir effect is not mentioned in my copy of The Feynman Lectures. I don’t think it was much discussed until 1968.
There’s a lot–too much–of AI-generated junk on YouTube. At least this is labeled (the first time I’ve seen that), and substantively ok, though very repetitive, and the oddly misplaced “um”s and “So”s are off-putting. If YouTube were smart and ethical it would require everything AI-generated to be labeled as such.
Trump wants a new battleship. This article has an interesting perspective. The son of Adm. Zumwalt discusses the DDG-1000 ship. As a former civilian employee of the Navy, I had seen renderings of it, but I wasn’t around when construction began.
The principle of the 7 P’s. Ha!
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/12/the_greatest_warship_that_wasn_t_before_it_was.html
More detail here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Zumwalt
This kind of thing is not harmless
Agreed.
Re Barry’s comment at 11:10am, I worked for decades in the electronics industry. Some people had a sneaking suspicion that environmental regulations – “RoHS” for “regulation of hazardous substances” were being used by the EU to advantage European manufacturers over American ones.
The issue, it should seem clear(!) is GLOBAL WEF reach, along with everything that implies, including—especially—digital banking overreach, which means that if you, your family, your company, your community, city, state or country DO NOT COMPLY with “da rules”, then you (etc.) are cut off from practically everything the state wants you (etc.) NOT to have/get/acquire/earn UNTIL you see the error of yer ways and change yer undesirable, anti-social behavior…to something more “acceptable” to the powers that be.
Klaus Schwab’s adulation of China’s modern-day mandarins is no coincidence.
And, “fortunately” (one might opine) we already had Justin Trudeau show us just how it was done—no doubt the Boy Wonder wishing to be first out of the box—i.e., what is in store, more precisely, what already has been attempted, accelerated, no doubt about it, by the “certain huge advantages” that AI offers.
Our Brave New World will have monuments in every single city, town and village square: Orwell and Huxley standing together, facing each other, warmly grasping both of each others’ hands, somewhat enigmatic smiles on their faces (spelling “ACHIEVEMENT”?). Made in China, of course…
…unless, perhaps, DJT or some Trump-like acolyte can inspire enough people of good will to oppose and even stem the insidious, destructive tide imposed by the ambitious, bureaucratic powers that be….
Short version: Living in precarious times…where “Stop the world, I wanna get off” will likely morph into “I have seen the future and it truly sucks”…
Oops:
“…out of the box…” should be
“…out of the blocks…”
I’m glad that the Minnesota (and Ohio, and Washington state and D.C., and Pennsylvania and California…) daycare scandal is getting folks agitated about fraudulent outlays of tax dollars, and I was glad that DOGE brought attention 10 months ago to the abuses of U.S. Aid.
There’s a second layer to this. All of these government agencies’ books are audited, regularly, by tax payer financed auditors. A scandal within these scandals is all the money being wasted on audits that either aren’t happening, aren’t being done effectively, or are done by auditors in on the grift.
It’s turtles all the way down.
I enjoy Feynman’s lectures and books no end. He is completely lucid and personally charming. My father met him once on a plane to Oak Ridge. I’d have loved to meet him myself.
@Rufus: All of these government agencies’ books are audited, regularly, by tax payer financed auditors. A scandal within these scandals is all the money being wasted on audits that either aren’t happening, aren’t being done effectively, or are done by auditors in on the grift.
The kind of thing they’d have to do to catch fake Somali daycares is way out of scope for an audit of a government agency. They’re not going to drive out to individual daycares and see if there’s kids there. They’re checking to see if internal procedures for authorizing, documenting, and making payments are being followed.
If a bunch of real kids with real SSNs are registered but never show up and their parents are getting envelopes of cash from the owner of the day care, the audit of the government agency is never going to detect that, because that’s not what auditors look for. They’re trying to catch wrong done by government employees, not wrong done to the government by people who don’t work for it.
Might show up in an audit of the day care, if anyone ever did one.
You may be thinking of forensic accounting, which is not typically part of a routine audit.
Looks like a better year for the FBI.
Well, one can always hope…
“Former FBI agent…explains how DEI split the agency and led to disaster: ‘They were hiring idiots’”—
https://nypost.com/2025/12/31/us-news/former-fbi-agent-nicole-parker-explains-how-dei-split-the-agency-and-led-to-disaster/
Opening grafs:
One can say with confidence that DEI was just doing what it was intended to do…by those who would TRANSFORM America….
Related…to Niketas Choniates’s most recent comment:
“THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES”—
https://instapundit.com/766050/
Wherein among many excellent links, we find:
Re: Feynman video
I really hate these soft fake videos.
Beyond the clickait this one isn’t a direct lie or misrepresentation WRT Feynman, as far as I can tell, but with some spot checks, I can’t find any of the quotes from the video transcript in “The Feynman Lectures.” Not even a mention of the Casimir Effect.
The video sounds reasonable and maybe Feynman said things like it somewhere, but at best it is an AI paraphrase — not to be relied upon for what Feynman truly said.
You can download a PDF here:
–“The Feynman lectures on physics”
https://kolegite.com/EE_library/books_and_lectures/%D0%A4%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0/The%20Feynman%20Lectures%20on%20Physics,%20Vol.%20I,II,III%20The%20New%20Millennium%20Edition%20by%20Richard%20P.%20Feynman%20(z-lib.org).pdf
Or consult a handy web version here.
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
Text of interview with Tucker Carlson:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tucker-carlson-talks-the-west-collective-punishment-and-antisemitism/
@Barry Meislin:Related…to Niketas Choniates’s most recent comment:
“THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES”
Well, not permitting audits is certainly not going to prevent fraud. But audits only detect and prevent certain limited kinds of fraud, and fraud isn’t really their focus. They are fundamentally box-checking exercises, the boxes being compliance with accounting standards.
Merry Christmas from Ann Coulter:
https://anncoulter.com/2025/12/25/come-all-ye-fake-christians/
@ Niketas > “The disclaimer says
The content is inspired by his teachings and created solely for educational and motivational purposes. This is not Richard Feynman’s voice. No impersonation is intended.”
It is to laugh.
Of course the impersonation is intended, otherwise no one would look at the video (as you noted in another comment).
@ Jimmy > “If YouTube were smart and ethical it would require everything AI-generated to be labeled as such.”
The disclaimer may qualify, although I doubt many people see it by clicking the “…more” button. Why would they?
Everybody knows —
“Everything you see on the internet is true!”
“The government wouldn’t allow people to lie on the internet!”
Hence the impetus for censoring disinformation, misinformation, and mal-information (by the definition of one side only), because nobody wants to waste time reading lies.
OTOH, these are obvious frauds, and the people being impersonated (which this clearly entails) are starting to bring suits. But the purveyors are more numerous than the victims, just like scammer call banks.
End rant.
Second huxley’s recommendation to read “The Feynman lectures on physics” and anything by Feynman, even the dense stuff.
Niketas, I assure you I know a great deal about auditing. There is absolutely no reason the scope of government audits could not include work to verify the legitimacy of a daycare’s operation.
Right.
So maybe that quote should be tweaked a bit…:
“THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES AND WHAT IT
DOESN’TREFUSES TO DO”100%, Barry. And in government auditors’ cases, what the workers refuse to do. It’s the rare government auditor who is productive even 50% of his or her “work” hours.
Niketas “But audits only detect and prevent certain limited kinds of fraud, and fraud isn’t really their focus. They are fundamentally box-checking exercises, the boxes being compliance with accounting standards.”
Gemini AI:
@Rufus:There is absolutely no reason the scope of government audits could not include work to verify the legitimacy of a daycare’s operation.
What’s your guess of the number of daycares that would need to be checked up on, to the nearest power of 10, the kind of checking that would need to be done to have caught this particular fraud, and how many FTEs would be needed to do that? Bearing in mind that that’s a single government program…auditors are going to drive out to Minnesota and Nebraska and California and stand in the parking lot while kids are dropped off? And drive out to every small business and see if the people who drive in at 9am are the people submitted for the paycheck protection (and what about remote work?)? And drive out to state universities to see if Pell Grant recipients are going to classes?
Maybe an excellent reason not to have such programs, but what you’re proposing should be the norm is far from practical, which is why this stuff takes so long to catch.
Please don’t bother to cut and paste AI slop. I don’t read it. If I want to know what it says I ask it myself. Nothing that’s done in the normal course of a normal audit would have caught the kind of fraud the Somali daycares are doing.
The font of all wisdom has spoken (Nick, you ignorant serfs) so don’t bother to question his vast experience of everything.
We are not worthy.
Yes it takes a long time to “catch” the Minnesota, California, Washington, and Ohio type fraud, especially when no one bothered to look, eh, Nick?
Please explain how that works.
‘Pay no attention to the fraud behind the curtain’ said the Wizzard of Oz.
Niketas is correct. The states should be hiring investigators, not auditors, whose job would be to surveil a suspected childcare facility and document over time the number of children coming and going. I don’t know if any state has investigators in their welfare departments. I do know Labor and Industries in Washington state used to employee people like that looking for fraudulent disability claims.
What’s the magnitude of the problem? A casual search of Minnesota website list over 9,000 licensed childcare providers in the state. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) has somewhere between 1500-2000 licensed providers and somewhere between 30-50,000 Somali residents. The total population of Hennepin County is 1.3 million. Ramsey County (St. Paul) has between 8-10,000 Somali residents.
There are between 80-105,000 Somali residents in the state. Most (80-90%) live in the metro Twin Cities area.
Extrapolating from the Washington state data (which is broken down by county and primary language), it is reasonable about 30% of the providers in Hennepin County or 450-600 providers are Somali language facilities. For the entire Twin Cities metro area there could be 1,000-1200. Here’s where some investigative journalism would be helpful. Or state workers that wanted to uncover fraud.
As an aside, Democratic State Senator Lisa Wellman in Washington state introduced legislation to expand privacy protections for personal information of licensed childcare providers, effectively making certain identifying data (such as home addresses, personal phone numbers, photographs, and other details) exempt from public disclosure under the state’s Public Records Act. The bill extends existing privacy exemptions—currently limited mostly to family home childcare providers—to all licensed or certified childcare providers, including those in centers and other settings. Imagine that.
In King County (Seattle), pop. 2.25 million, the state list 349 primary Somali language providers out of 2800 total providers. Almost the entire Somali population in the state lives in King County (around 14,000).
@Rufus: It’s not that fraud isn’t important to prevent and check for. It’s that audits are not the right tool for that except in certain cases. Audits really only check on paperwork. They have a very limited ability to detect correct paperwork that doesn’t have any reality behind it. It’s not reasonable to expect audits and auditors to do something they’re not set up to do and blame them for not doing it.
An audit of a government department is there to check up on what the government employees are doing, fundamentally. They’re not going to be able to dig in to the operations of everyone having business with the government to make sure they are not defrauding the government in some way.
It’s not that audits shouldn’t be done, they definitely should. But they’re not a magic crystal ball that reveals fraud.