Suchir Balaji, 26, claimed the company broke copyright law.

A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week.

Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Police had been called to the Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being, a police spokesperson said.

The medical examiner's office determined the manner of death to be suicide and police officials this week said there is "currently, no evidence of foul play."

Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.

I used to believe that the only way we were going to get out of this mess was to flip sheep (apologies to those offended by my continued use of the word "sheep" — old habits die hard). Meaning that if we got everyone, or mostly everyone, to see what truly was going on, then we could stop the insanity.

In other words, if everyone woke up there would be no more compliance, no more believing in the lies, no more falling into the agenda's traps.

Now I am not so sure.

It seems now that the only way this insanity will work its way out is either by a direct act of God or if we are willing to wait 1,000 years or so when it works out on its own. Maybe we just need to face Armageddon, let it happen, and try to live the best life we can before and while it's happening. I don't mean "give up," I mean to still fight but focus the fight on things other than trying to flip sheep.

I know I've said this before, but now I am refining this idea a bit. Although I do believe once we know something, we can't unknow it — meaning we can't force ourselves into a state of denial and pretend all is rosy as the sheep tend to do (now that they've got Trump to feel dismal about, maybe they won't be all rosy, but for the wrong reasons). But maybe we should stop focusing on it so much and try to get back to the basics of joyous living. Did I really just say that? No, of course not.

I have found myself envying the sheep. I recently had a friend on FB question something I had posted (a comment actually on someone's meme about chemtrails). She had said she simply did not understand what was being said negatively about natural contrails that jets innocently leave behind. I turned her on to a James Corbett video interviewing Peter Kirby about chemtrails.

She responded with the usual disbelief — "how could people be doing this without anyone knowing — purposefully poisoning the earth and all of the people on it?"

I didn't push it and just said, "You seem to be enjoying your life, keep doing that and don't let this cat out of the bag. Let it go." It was the first time I did something like that, and it felt right. I had the opportunity to possibly flip a sheep, and I didn't take it. I believe, however, that this "letting go" only applies to sheep. Whereas before, I wanted sheep to learn the truth about the world, now I am not so anxious to be the one to wreck their day.

They will figure it out soon enough.

Russia's Duma passed a bill yesterday banning children who are not proficient in Russian from attending school. The law takes aim at migrant children, who must now pass a Russian language proficiency exam.

The State Duma, which passed the bill 409-1, is the lower house of Russia's Federal Assembly.

Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin also clarified that migrant children will have their legal status in the country checked, that is, if they are living in the country legally.

The upper house of Russia's parliament, the Federation Council, is expected to pass the bill as well, with it set to come into force in April 2025 after President Vladimir Putin signs it into law.

In an uncommon (these days) act of objective journalism, James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas and now the CEO of OMG Media, has gone to Western North Carolina to investigate. He went to see who was telling the truth about the situation there: the federal government or the people struggling to survive in tents in freezing temperatures.

This isn't the first time FEMA has been accused of not aiding the survivors of a disaster. The accusations of cold disinterest to downright negligence were also present after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Superstorm Sandy in the North Eastern states, and the terrible wildfire that ravaged Lahaina on Maui, Hawaii.

In each case, the story was the same. Victims of the disasters criticized FEMA's lackluster responses and were accused by the media of spreading "harmful misinformation."

Hundreds of Israeli airstrikes have wiped out the majority of Syria's military capabilities in the last few days

Obeida Arnaout, a spokesman for the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) extremist group that just took over Syria after a joint assault with Turkish-backed fighters, refused to address Israel's airstrikes across the country in an interview aired by British news outlet Channel 4 on 11 December.

During the interview, Arnaout avoided answering the question twice.

"Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it's spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull'd, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men." - Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Long ago, but what seems like only yesterday, I didn't go to the U.S. war against Vietnam but the war came to me. It was when my exile began.

I am telling you this to try to shed some light on today's wars and alarums since my tale is common for a small subset of Americans of my generation. We learned long ago that the USA was run by ruthless killers who reveled in war. Vietnam, the Phoenix Program, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc. Nothing was beyond them. We sensed that they would never stop and they haven't. The genocide of Palestinians, the proxy war via Ukraine against Russia, the current US/Israel/Turkey bloodbath in Syria and Lebanon led by our ruthless terrorists - it is all nightmarish, malevolent, utterly evil, and conjures up hell on earth. And it will get worse in the future.

Jay-Z, the star rapper and entrepreneur whose real name is Shawn Carter, was accused in a lawsuit Sunday of raping a 13-year-old girl in 2000 allegedly along with Sean "Diddy" Combs.

The anonymous accuser, identified only as "Jane Doe," said the assault happened after she was driven to an MTV Video Music Awards after-party.

The federal lawsuit was originally filed in October in the Southern District of New York, listing Combs as a defendant. It was refiled Sunday to include Carter.

Texas-based attorney Tony Buzbee, who filed the suit, did not comment.

Carter called the allegations "idiotic" in a lengthy statement Sunday evening and alleged that Buzbee was engaged in unprofessional behavior.

After years of rumours that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from a laboratory in China, the virologist at the centre of the claims has presented data on dozens of new coronaviruses collected from bats in southern China. At a conference in Japan this week, Shi Zhengli, a specialist on bat coronaviruses, reported that none of the viruses stored in her freezers are the most recent ancestors of the virus SARS-CoV-2.

Shi was leading coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a high-level biosafety laboratory, when the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in that city. Soon afterwards, theories emerged that the virus had leaked — either by accident or deliberately — from the WIV.

Shi has consistently said that SARS-CoV-2 was never seen or studied in her lab. But some commentators have continued to ask whether one of the many bat coronaviruses her team collected in southern China over decades was closely related to it. Shi promised to sequence the genomes of the coronaviruses and release the data.

The latest analysis, which has not been peer reviewed, includes data from the whole genomes of 56 new betacoronaviruses, the broad group to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs, as well as some partial sequences. All the viruses were collected between 2004 and 2021.

Last week, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death on a New York City sidewalk in what was clearly a thoroughly planned-out attack. Over the next few days, as authorities hunted for the killer, online progressives did not try hard to hide their delight that a millionaire health insurance executive like Thompson was killed.

Social media was flooded with posts and videos — with different ranges of subtlety — suggesting that Thompson, at the very least, did not deserve to be mourned because of all the health care his company has denied to poor and working people. Progressives framed the shooting as an act of self-defense on behalf of the working class. Before the alleged killer was caught Monday, they promised not to snitch if they saw the shooter themselves and fantasized about a working-class jury nullifying all charges, leading to other CEOs getting gunned down with impunity if they oversaw price increases.

The narrative that these online progressives clearly subscribe to and perpetuate is one where, in the United States, healthcare is a totally unfettered, unregulated industry; where — because of a total lack of government involvement — wealthy CEOs charge whatever prices they want and then refuse to provide customers what they already paid for without facing any bad consequences.

The characterization of healthcare and health insurance companies charging absurdly high prices while treating their customers terribly without the risk of losing them is spot on.

Public health policies cannot strip physicians of their free speech rights, the plaintiffs' lawyer said.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week revived an emergency application to block the Washington Medical Commission from investigating licensed physicians in the state over their criticism of COVID-19 policies.

The Washington state commission deems the doctors' dissenting views on the disease as potentially dangerous misinformation that should be suppressed. The physicians counter that just because they have medical licenses they don't forfeit their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

The Dec. 4 order by Thomas regarding the application in Stockton v. Ferguson was unusual in that Justice Elena Kagan rejected the same application on Nov. 20. The applicants renewed their request in a court filing directed to Thomas on Nov. 22.