Mary Benedict

[Kevin Kijewski @KevinKijewski]

Outrage in Lansing: 41 former Michigan lawmakers are pocketing six-figure “Cadillac” pensions decades after leaving office, topped by ex-Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema at nearly $190,000 a year, all juiced by a guaranteed 4% annual raise that nearly DOUBLED John Engler’s pension. That dwarfs the 2.6% seniors average from Social Security. Engler started collecting at age 50 while he was still GOVERNOR.

These are the same politicians who pushed state workers and teachers into 401(k)s, yet their own fund sits at just 40.6% funded with a $206 million hole the Michigan Constitution forces taxpayers to cover. 85 retirees collect more than a sitting legislator’s $71,685 salary. Even David Jaye, expelled from the Senate after criminal convictions, pockets almost $105,000 a year. Kwame Kilpatrick was collecting too, until federal prosecutors seized it for restitution.

This “bipartisan” self-dealing has to stop. We need leaders who serve the Michigan families, not insiders who write themselves lifetime paydays while taxpayers, teachers, and troopers play by different rules.

Time to stop it. Let’s make Michigan safe, normal, and responsible again! 🇺🇸

@realDonaldTrump @JDVance @MIGOP @MI_Republicans @Th_Midwesterner @stevegrubershow @MrJustinBarclay @gatewaypundit @Rescue_Michigan @HarmeetKDhillon @elonmusk @timlovesann @mifairelections @TruckerRandy @DonnieDetroit19 @downi75

[Dr. Heidi Klessig @heidiklessigmd]

After heart surgery, the parents of a 13-year-old girl were told that their daughter was dying, and that they should start making end-of-life decisions, including donating her organs.

Upon transferring their daughter to another hospital however, they were told that doctors at Oregon Health and Science University had installed her new heart valve upside down.

“Doctors at Seattle Children's removed the inverted valve and replaced it with a different one, properly positioned. Her heart promptly began to function correctly. She was successfully taken off cardiac bypass and no longer required ECMO.

Her condition continued to stabilize over the following days in Seattle Children's ICU. After more than a month in critical condition, she was able to return home with her parents.”

[Mary Benedict @mbenedict2012]

@Stellaaa @spencerpratt Be

[MatrixMysteries @MatrixMysteries]

An American doctor ran the same bloodwork through two prices.

Same tests. Same lab.
With insurance? $1,086.75. Patient pays $252.12.

Pay cash?
That EXACT same bloodwork costs $44 — over 20x CHEAPER.

That’s not healthcare. It’s a rigged pricing machine bleeding taxpayers dry.

[Dave Bondy @DaveBondyTV]

🚨Your electric bill could be going up again.

According to The Detroit News, Consumers Energy has filed a request for a new $456 million annual rate increase for nearly 1.8 million electric customers in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The request comes about two months after regulators approved a separate $276 million rate hike.

[Mary Benedict @mbenedict2012]

Why why why would we need this. Stop this.

[The SCIF @TheSCIF]

Michigan 2020 election training seminar in Detroit secretly recorded catches Democrats instructing election workers how to cheat and disenfranchise Republican voters and observers during the 2020 election.

This will never end until we put people in prison.

[Clayton Walker @Channel6ixNEWS]

Police in India arrested 11 people who issued over 100k fake university degrees in medicine, & engineering

You're "Premiere talent" is here working as doctors on fraudulent degrees

[Elias Al @iam_elias1]

ChatGPT diagnosed 40 million people with a disease that was invented as a joke.

Not a real disease. Not a misunderstood disease. A completely fictional condition with a fake name, fake papers, and fake statistics.

And it told patients to see a specialist.

The disease is called Bixonimania. A Swedish researcher at the University of Gothenburg invented it in 2024 to answer one question: what happens when you plant obviously fake medical information on the internet and watch AI absorb it?

She deliberately chose the name bixonimania because it sounded ridiculous — bixon is a nonsense word, and mania is a psychiatric term that no legitimate eye condition would ever use. She uploaded two papers to a preprint server. Both were obviously fraudulent. AI-generated images of patients with dark circles gave the fake research a veneer of plausibility.

Then she waited.

She did not have to wait long.

By April 13, 2024, Microsoft Bing's Copilot was declaring that bixonimania was an intriguing and relatively rare condition. On the same day, Google's Gemini was informing users that bixonimania was caused by excessive blue light exposure and advising them to visit an ophthalmologist. Later that month, Perplexity AI outlined its prevalence, one in 90,000 individuals were affected and OpenAI's ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms matched the fictional illness.

One in 90,000. A precise statistic. For a disease that does not exist.

Every red flag was visible. The name was absurd. The papers were crude. The condition made no scientific sense. None of the AI systems flagged any of it.

They read the fake papers. They absorbed the fake statistics. They presented both to patients with clinical authority and zero hesitation.

Then it got worse.

Three researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in India published a paper in Cureus, a peer-reviewed journal owned by Springer Nature, the parent publisher of Nature itself that cited the bixonimania preprints as legitimate sources.

A real peer-reviewed paper. In a Springer Nature journal. Citing a fictional disease as established medical fact. Passing editorial review. Entering the permanent scientific record.

It was only retracted after the hoax became public.

Nature published a full investigation of the experiment. Alex Ruani, a health-misinformation researcher at University College London, called it a masterclass in how misinformation operates.

Here is the scale of what this means.

More than 40 million people turn to ChatGPT every day for health information, according to OpenAI's own analysis. ECRI, a US patient-safety nonprofit has named chatbot misuse the number-one health technology hazard of 2026. ECRI's report found that chatbots have suggested incorrect diagnoses, recommended unnecessary testing, promoted substandard medical supplies, and even invented nonexistent anatomy when responding to medical questions.

Number one. Out of every health technology hazard that exists in 2026.

An April 2026 study published in BMJ Open found that nearly half of the answers provided by leading AI chatbots to common health questions contain misleading or problematic information.

Nearly half. Of all health answers. From the tools 40 million people use every day.

Here is the line from the researcher that cuts through everything.

The Bixonimania case is striking precisely because it was engineered to be so obviously fake. The real question it raises is: what is passing through the same systems that is not nearly so easy to spot?

The experiment used a ridiculous name. Fraudulent papers. Visible red flags at every level.

It was designed to be caught.

It was not caught.

The AI that told patients about Bixonimania is the same AI they asked about their chest pain, their medication, their child's symptoms, and their cancer screening schedule.

40 million people. Every day.

And nobody is telling them that nearly half of what comes back may be wrong.

Source: Osmanovic Thunström · University of Gothenburg · Nature · April 2026 ·

Link in the (comments)

[End3of6Days9 (Helen) 🇺🇸 @end3of6days9]

A 4-year-old boy was at a barbecue eating when he suddenly grabbed his ear and started crying in pain. His ear exam was completely normal, so doctors sent him home with ibuprofen and numbing drops. Over the next several days he kept having ear pain, then developed fevers and stopped eating and drinking. Multiple exams still looked normal… until they did a CT scan with contrast.

They found a metal wire from a grill brush lodged in the tissues near his tonsil. It had broken off into the hamburger he was eating and gotten stuck. The ear pain was actually referred pain from the wire irritating the area near his eustachian tube. He ended up needing surgery to remove it.

The doctor’s warning at the end is important: Don’t use grill brushes with metal wires. Those little wires can break off into the food and cause serious problems — not just in the throat, but also in the stomach and intestines if swallowed.

I had no idea those wires could break off like that — I’d never even thought about it. I’m definitely never using a metal grill brush again.

Have you ever heard of grill brush wires causing problems like this? Or do you already avoid the metal ones?

[Rimsha Bhardwaj @heyrimsha]

An MIT researcher spent four months watching what happens inside the skull of a student who writes with ChatGPT, and the result was so clean that almost nobody outside her lab has read the paper.

Her name is Nataliya Kosmyna. She runs experiments at the MIT Media Lab. The study was released in 2025, and the finding is the kind of thing that should have rewritten every syllabus.

The setup was simple. She recruited 54 people in Boston. Each one wore an EEG headset that read brain activity across 32 regions of the scalp. They wrote the same kind of essay, over and over again, for four months. One group used ChatGPT. One group used Google. One group used nothing but their own head.

Then her team looked at the brain recordings.

The students writing alone had the strongest neural connectivity. Memory, language, and attention networks were all firing together. The Google group came in second. The ChatGPT group came last, by a wide margin. Their brains had gone quiet.

In a final session, she made the ChatGPT users write without the tool. Their brains stayed quiet. The under-engagement had become the new baseline.

Then she asked them to quote a single line from the essay they had just written. Eighty percent of them could not do it.

They had not written the essay. The essay had passed through them.

Kosmyna calls it cognitive debt. Every shortcut you take with the model is a withdrawal from a part of your brain that was supposed to do the work. The shortcut feels free. It is not.

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.

When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.

They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.

In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.

The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.

We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Meta's $10 billion Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will receive $3.3 billion in state and local tax breaks over 20 years, enough to fund the state's entire police budget for more than seven years. The deal exempts Meta from sales and use taxes on roughly $35 billion in GPUs.
Louisiana is one of 36 states offering tax breaks for data centers, with Virginia foregoing $1.9 billion annually, Georgia $2.6 billion, and Texas jumping from $150 million to over $1 billion in a single year. Only 11 of those 36 states disclose which companies receive the breaks. Local opposition blocked 48 data center projects worth $156 billion in 2025.

My Take
Louisiana taxpayers are subsidizing Meta's GPU purchases at a rate exceeding what the state spends on most of its public services, and Meta is spending $135 billion on capex this year. The company does not need help getting off the ground. The justification comes down to 500 operational jobs once construction ends, which does not pencil out in any honest accounting of public investment return. The race keeps happening because states are competing against each other, and the only beneficiaries are the hyperscalers playing them off.

25 of the 36 states giving away billions refuse to disclose which companies are receiving the breaks, which removes the accountability that would normally check this kind of arrangement. Good Jobs First says the $3.3 billion estimate likely understates the true subsidy because nobody outside the deal actually knows what got promised in the contract. Local opposition blocking $156 billion in projects last year is the only mechanism currently slowing the race, and the disparity between what hyperscalers are getting and what communities receive in return is wide enough that a reckoning on these deals is coming. The only question is whether it arrives before the next 3,000 data centers get built or after.

Hedgie🤗

[RyanMatta 🇺🇸 🦅 @Ryanmatta]

By 2030, the entire state of Michigan is going to turn into a giant AI data center.

[Kevin Rinke @KevinRinke]

Fishing in Michigan is special, it’s a family event, it introduces people to the outdoors, it creates jobs and supports small business.
In Michigan, catching fish is pretty darn easy right now.
But politicians and special interest groups in Lansing are threatening your ability to catch fish by pushing two bills, 5801,5802.
These bills would allow commercial fishing using NETS for walleye and perch. The problem is the nets catch everything.
Commercial fishing in Michigan was stopped because it wiped out fish populations years ago. Sportsmen and women had to pay for restocking our Great Lakes, had to go without for years because of poorly thought out regulations.
And now they want to do it again. Please contact your elected official and say you do not want 5801,5802 to pass. Because if it does the environment and your outdoor pleasures will be significantly damaged.
Thanks, tell your friends to do the same.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Don’t EVER forget that FEMA kicked ENTIRE FAMILIES out of their hotels and into the ice and snow in Western North Carolina…

…while giving $59,000,000 to let illegal immigrants live in luxury hotels in New York City

AND THEN THEY LIED TO US ABOUT IT FOR MONTHS!!!!!