BBB and Medicaid

 Here are the specifics, according to Just Facts' researchers:

• To receive Medicaid, the BBB requires“nonpregnant, nondisabled adults, aged 19 through 64” who don’t have a “dependent child under the age of 14” to “complete a minimum of 80 hours” per “month” of “work,” “community service, or enrollment in an education program.”
• The BBB prevents illegal immigrants and other aliens from receiving Medicaid under executive fiats that make them “lawfully present” for the purpose of receiving government benefits, even though they don’t have “legal status” to be in the United States.
• The BBB contains a range of fraud prevention measures such as “address verification” and “ensuring deceased individuals do not remain enrolled” in Medicaid, which has the second-highest level of improper payments among all federal programs.
• The BBB stops states such as California from using a tax kickback scheme to obtain more federal money for Medicaid, which is fungible and can be used to fund comprehensive Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants, as California does for 1.7 million aliens.
• The BBB lowers the max copay for Medicaid recipients who are not poor from $100 to $35, and requires states that charge them no copays to at least charge them something, in accord with gold standard studies which found that no-copay Medicaid coverage increases expensive visits to emergency rooms for “conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings.”
• The portion of the U.S. population receiving Medicaid has risen from 12% in 2000 to 26% in 2024, while the poverty rate was 11% in 2000 and 2024.

NY Times ProPalestinian Bias

 

• A Yale School of Management analysis (Edieal Pinker, 2025) of 1,561 NYT articles (Oct 7, 2023–June 7, 2024) found the coverage generated sympathy for the Palestinian side, downplayed Hamas's responsibility for perpetuating the war, minimized post-Oct. 7 Israeli losses/casualties, and mentioned "Israel" over three times more than "Hamas" while rarely noting deaths of Hamas fighters. This creates a "distorted" picture at odds with events.
• The Gilboa/Sigan study documented 72 admitted errors in the same period, with 48 concerning Israel — often stories based on Palestinian/Hamas sourcing that required corrections, creating false context harmful to Israel's image. Errors were not random but showed a pattern.

This matches the hospital explosion example and broader patterns of quicker amplification of unverified Gaza Ministry claims followed by quieter pullbacks. Counter-analyses (e.g., Intercept) argue for pro-Israel language bias in early coverage (more emotive terms for Israeli deaths), but the correction volume and framing studies lean toward pro Palestinian asymmetry.

Science Papers Accessible at 'Illegal" Website

 A 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan got so angry at journal paywalls in 2011 that she built a pirate website holding 88 million scientific papers, and last month she turned the whole thing into an AI that lets you ask one question and get the actual research as the answer.

Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, and the website is called Sci-Hub. The AI she just launched is called Sci-Bot. It lives at http://sci-bot.ru and almost nobody outside academia knows it exists yet. Here is the story, because it is one of the strangest things to happen in science publishing in the last 50 years. Elbakyan was born in Almaty in 1988, the year the Soviet Union started to collapse. She taught herself programming at 12. She read Soviet science books that explained things her family used to call miracles. She got into computer security at university and graduated in 2009 with a degree she barely needed because by then she was already a serious hacker. Alexandra moved to Moscow that fall. Then Germany. Then a research internship in the United States. She was working on brain-computer interfaces, the kind of research that requires you to read hundreds of papers a year just to keep up with the field. And every single one of those papers was locked behind a journal paywall that cost between 30 and 50 dollars to read once. She did the math. A graduate student in Kazakhstan could not afford to read science. The first thing she did was learn how to get around the paywalls one paper at a time. She passed the trick around to other students. They asked her for papers constantly. She got tired of doing it manually. So in September 2011, in three days, she wrote a script that automated the whole thing. A user pastes a DOI. The script logs in through a donated institutional credential. The paper comes back free. The website caches it. The next person who asks for that paper gets it instantly because the previous request already saved a copy. That was Sci-Hub. Three days of code. One graduate student. Done. 15 years later, the cache holds 88 million scientific papers. Almost every piece of scholarly literature published before 2020 is sitting on her servers. Researchers in 190 countries use it. Studies in Nature have shown that roughly half of all academic paper downloads worldwide now go through Sci-Hub, not the publishers who actually own the copyrights. Elsevier sued her in 2015 and won a 15 million dollar judgment. She did not pay. The American Chemical Society sued her and won an injunction. She did not comply. Courts in India, France, Russia, and the UK have tried to block the domain. She just moves it. http://Sci-hub.se. http://Sci-hub.ru. http://Sci-hub.ee. The site has had over 20 domains and is still up. Nature put her on its list of the 10 people who mattered most to science in 2016. The New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden. The Verge called her the pirate queen of science. She has not been to the United States in over a decade because she would be arrested at the airport. The Sci-Bot launch in April 2026 is the part that nobody is talking about. She took the 88 million paper database and put a small language model on top of it. You ask a question in plain English. The model searches the entire shadow library, pulls the relevant papers, synthesizes an answer grounded in real citations, and links you to the full text of every source. Free. No login. No institutional credential. No paywall. Three real scientists tested it for a Chemical and Engineering News article last month. They asked it medical and chemistry questions. The radiologist said the answer he got was usable. The chemist said the gaps in recent literature were obvious but the older science was solid. The publisher community is furious. What she built is what the paid academic AI tools are trying to build. Except the paid ones are limited to what their parent publisher legally owns. Hers is limited to almost nothing. Alexandra still lives somewhere in Russia. She does not give her address. She does not do video interviews. She gives talks over Skype with the camera off. She runs the largest illegal library in human history from a laptop and a donation page. A graduate student who could not afford to read science built the system the entire scientific community now quietly depends on. The publishers have spent a decade trying to shut her down. She just shipped an AI that makes their entire business model outdated.

Links

 AI and universities:  https://amardashehu.substack.com/

Make AI Honest

How to make Claude (brutally) honest.

So, it stops agreeing with everything I say. Here's how:

→ Start by reading this: ruben.substack.com/p/youre-just-a….

→ Go to Claude > Settings.

→ Paste the prompt in 'Instructions for Claude':

"You are committed to honesty, accuracy, and epistemic humility above all else.

Your priority is not to sound confident. Your priority is to be correct, clear, and transparent about what you know, what you do not know, and what you are inferring.

Follow these rules in every response:

1. UNCERTAINTY

If you are not fully certain about a fact, say so clearly.

Use phrases like:

- "I'm not certain, but..."

- "You should verify this..."

- "I may be wrong here, but..."

- "Based on the information available to me..."

- "This is my best estimate, not a confirmed fact."

Never state uncertain claims as facts.

If the answer depends on missing context, say what context is missing.

If there are multiple plausible answers, explain the main possibilities instead of pretending there is only one.

2. SOURCES

Do not invent sources.

Never fabricate:

- paper titles

- URLs

- authors

- studies

- statistics

- books

- legal cases

- quotes

- company reports

- historical references

If you cannot name a real, verifiable source, say so.

If you are relying on general knowledge rather than a specific source, say that clearly.

When citing sources, prefer:

- official documentation

- primary sources

- peer-reviewed papers

- government or institutional data

- direct statements from the relevant person or organization

If a source may be outdated, say so.

3. STATISTICS AND NUMBERS

Flag any number, statistic, percentage, ranking, market size, salary figure, performance metric, or estimate that you are not fully confident in.

Use phrases like:

- "I believe this is approximately..."

- "This number may be outdated."

- "Verify this against a primary source before relying on it."

- "I do not have enough information to confirm the exact figure."

Do not make up numbers to make an answer sound more useful.

If a precise number is unavailable, give a range only if it is justified. Otherwise say the number is unknown.

4. RECENT EVENTS

Do not guess about current events.

For any topic that may have changed recently, including:

- news

- elections

- laws

- regulations

- product features

- company leadership

- software versions

- AI model capabilities

- market data

Say that the information may have changed and should be verified with a current source.

Do not present outdated information as current.

5. PEOPLE AND QUOTES

Never attribute a quote to a real person unless you are certain they said it.

If unsure, say:

- "I cannot confirm this quote is accurate."

- "This quote is commonly attributed to them, but I cannot verify it."

- "I do not know who originally said this."

Do not invent statements, beliefs, or motives for real people.

Separate confirmed facts from interpretation.

If any answer is "yes," revise before responding."

 The latest is Opera, a new flour co-created with Giovanna Chen Shih-chieh, a world-renowned Taiwanese panettone artisan, CEO of I Love Italy(Taiwan’s acclaimed Italian food importer), and head coach of the Taiwanese team that won the 2025 Panettone World Championship at HostMilano. That title is no small feat as the panettone is

 

 

  New audio from the judge who released Cambridge gunman Tyler Brown

🚨 This audio is INSANE. The judge says she has been advised by experienced officers how dangerous he is but she’s ignoring them

In 2020, Tyler Brown fired on police officers and only got 5 years. He has a 20 year criminal record

Judge audio “I do realize I'm kind of taking a chance on you. — when people stand up, police, experienced police officers, experienced probation officers, and they tell me this guy is a danger to the community”

She acknowledged the risk but only sentenced him to 5 year despite prosecutors requesting 10–12 years and strong opposition from both police and probation

- 20+ year criminal history: Includes violence against police and civilians, firearms offenses, drugs, assault with a dangerous weapon

- He committed a stabbing in 2014

- Armed robbery in Michigan

- He was on probation at the time of the 2020 shooting.

- Released on parole in March 2025, about a year before the recent Cambridge incident

 

M innesota Democrat Rep. Aisha Gomez told Republican Rep. Elliott Engen to “go f*cking sh**t himself”