The case for treating adults as adults when it comes to AI chatbots

Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by John Coleman

“Recent news reports describe a wave of lawsuits alleging that OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, caused adult users psychological distress. The filings reportedly seek monetary damages for people who conversed at length with a chatbot’s simulated persona and reported experiencing delusions and emotional trauma. In one reported case, a man became convinced that ChatGPT was sentient and later took his own life. These situations are tragic and call for genuine compassion. Unfortunately, if these lawsuits succeed, they’ll effectively impose an unworkable expectation on anyone creating a chatbot to scrub anything that could trigger its most vulnerable users. Everyone, even fully capable adults, would be effectively treated as if they are on suicide watch. That’s a standard that would chill open discourse.” (11/24/25)

https://www.thefire.org/news/case-treating-adults-adults-when-it-comes-ai-chatbots

Year-End Fundraiser Update: Or, Kinda Depressing

Hey, everyone …

A “zero-dollar day” in our year-end fundraiser yesterday. Our total remains at $1,285.84.

Our goal is $5,501; once we’ve raised $2,750.50, reader GL has pledged to “match funds” for the other half.

But to get that second half, we must raise the first half, and that’s going more slowly than usual this year.

It’s a little depressing, but I’m not going to belabor THAT feeling at length. Instead, I’m just going to ask YOU to support the freedom movement’s daily newspaper at …

https://news.rationalreview.com/support-rrnd

… and help us get back on track by pushing us to $2,000 by next Monday.

Have a great day.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review News Digest / Freedom News Daily

A Henry Ford for Housing

Source: Law & Liberty
by Nathan Smith

“To house people more affordably, we need to make homebuilding more efficient. But a deeply entrenched overregulation of land use and the building trades keeps homebuilding firms small and backward. Other industries — aviation, computing, agriculture, containerized shipping, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and so on — have raised productivity through deregulation, big business, innovation, automation, standardization, and scalability. Homebuilding needs to follow suit.” (11/24/25)

https://lawliberty.org/a-henry-ford-for-housing/

Australia: Senator condemned for burka stunt in parliament

Source: BBC News [UK state media]

“An Australian senator has provoked anger for wearing a burka in parliament, after pushing for a ban on the Muslim garment. Pauline Hanson was condemned by fellow senators, with one accusing her of “blatant racism”. Proceedings in the senate were halted as she refused to remove the item. The Queensland senator, of the anti-immigration One Nation party, was seeking to introduce a bill that would ban full face coverings in public – a policy she has long campaigned for. It is the second time she has worn the garment – which covers the face and body – in parliament, and said her actions were in protest at the senate rejecting her bill.” (11/24/25)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz94pdkzqvwo

The Censorship Industrial Complex’s Power Grip in Germany

Source: Racket News
by Greg Collard

“Many organizations and federal agencies involved in censoring Americans under the guise of mis/disinformation have shut down in the last couple years. Racket’s Twitter Files exposed the level of censorship slime oozing from organizations such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Project, and the Virality Project. On the government side of things, there was the Global Engagement Center, the Foreign Influence Task Force, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which still exists but is no longer involved in mis/disnfo work. That’s not to say America is perfect when it comes to free speech, but as Sen. Rand Paul said in September, ‘throughout government, the censorship apparatus that Biden had put in place is gone.’ However, if you look to Germany, the strongest economic power in the European Union, it’s easy to see where America was going.” (11/24/25)

https://www.racket.news/p/the-censorship-industrial-complexs

The Fed Doesn’t Determine the Price of Credit. Markets Do

Source: The Daily Economy
by Alexander W Salter

“Recent movements in short-term loan markets are a timely reminder of a forgotten truth: The Federal Reserve is not the master of credit conditions. It can influence interest rates, but it cannot dictate them. Interest rates ultimately reflect supply and demand conditions in the broader financial system. When those conditions shift, the Fed’s administered rates give way to market realities. That’s precisely what we’re seeing in the repo market now.” (11/24/25)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-fed-doesnt-determine-the-price-of-credit-markets-do/

Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, 1943-2025

Source: New York Times

“Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who as H. Rap Brown defined [b]lack militancy in the 1960s with a call to arms against white oppression, and who later lived quietly as a Muslim cleric and shopkeeper until his arrest in 2000 in the murder of a sheriff’s deputy, died on Sunday in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. He was 82. … Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Mr. Al-Amin was one of the most incendiary orators among the Black Power activists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement.” (11/23/25)

https://archive.is/BHeBU

The Real Fight Over Geoengineering Is Beginning

Source: The Atlantic
by Alexander C Kaufman

“For years, the idea of geoengineering — artificially lowering global temperatures through technological means — has been met with skepticism. Only a handful of dedicated and much-criticized scientists have argued for researching it at all, and when others weighed in, it was generally to trash the idea. This September, in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Science, more than 40 experts in climate change, polar geosciences, and ocean patterns warned that geoengineering was extremely unlikely to work and likely to have dangerous consequences. … As the actual predictions for Earth’s future have become more dire, scientists are starting to agree. More than 120 of them signed on to a response to the Frontiers paper that argued that more research into geoengineering was, in fact, ‘urgently needed.'” (11/24/25)

https://archive.is/IYgEB