“The Republican Party of Florida filed suit on Friday against the Florida Democratic Party, many of its candidates, and a slew of television stations, seeking to stop the airing of a political ad that highlights the leaked grand jury presentment in the Hope Florida scandal. … State statutes ‘make it unlawful for any person to knowingly broadcast the content, gist, or import of testimony of a witness examined before a grand jury. The advertisement does exactly that,’ the lawsuit states.” [editor’s note: If I was a Republican official or candidate, I wouldn’t want the Democrats to mention that prominent people in my party misappropriated $10 million and used it to rig an election, either. But I might want to look up “Streisand Effect” before filing suit over it – TLK] (10/19/26)
“Many people assume that once something is published online, it will remain forever retrievable. The saying that ‘the internet never forgets’ has produced a dangerously false sense of permanence. In reality, the internet forgets continuously. Websites are constantly revised, deleted, and abandoned altogether. This is why, 30 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive. I wanted to build a mechanism for permanence in the internet age. Soon after that, I helped build the Internet Archive’s most-used resource, the Wayback Machine, a system that would preserve webpages as they appeared at any one moment in time, allowing future readers to return to those moments. … What began as an effort to preserve the web has become an essential tool for journalists, researchers, historians, and the broader public.
Yet the future of this tool has become extremely vulnerable.” (10/19/26)
“President Trump wants to hold a trilateral summit with Chinese President Xi and Russian President Putin in China next month to discuss ‘denuclearization’ — but not necessarily Ukraine. Such a summit between the leaders of the U.S., China and Russia would be unprecedented. Trump has been talking for two years about his aspiration to reach a deal with Russia and China to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. But so far Putin and Xi haven’t shown much openness to the idea. … The Kremlin has been floating the idea of holding such a meeting since July. Putin raised the issue in two phone calls with Trump, including one last week. The Chinese government hasn’t expressed willingness to hold such a summit. … When asked on Monday whether such a summit could discuss ending the war in Ukraine, Trump said he wants to hold such a trilateral meeting, but in order to discuss other issues.” (10/19/26)
“The idea that tax cuts, deregulation, and a slightly less destructive monetary policy can produce enough economic growth to eliminate deficits has been an article of faith among many conservative economists and Republican politicians since the late seventies. An insight of supply-side economists is that, since cutting taxes incentivizes people to work and invest, government can increase revenue by cutting taxes. Over time, the growth produced by low tax rates is expected to enable government to reduce or even eliminate its debt without making spending cuts. This theory benefits Republicans who can campaign promising to cut taxes while avoiding discussing what may be unpopular spending cuts. One of the problems with this theory is deficit spending itself inhibits economic growth by causing the Federal Reserve to monetize the federal debt.” (10/19/26)
“Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University demonstrator who became a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian foreign students, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to take up his case, his lawyers said. … The Supreme Court turns away the vast majority of petitions to hear cases and will consider Khalil’s at a closed-door meeting in the coming months. His lawyers expressed hope it will be on track to be heard this term. Until the justices decide how to proceed, Khalil will remain free. The green-card holder has emerged as a face of the Trump administration’s [abductions] of noncitizen college students and faculty who’ve expressed pro-Palestinian support. Immigration authorities [abducted] Khalil in March 2025, and he was jailed until a federal judge ordered his release a few months later.” (10/19/26)
“Gangs in Haiti have opened fire on an armored vehicle, leaving four [gang members] from El Salvador unaccounted for in the first major attack since an international gang suppression [gang] began operations in the violence-wracked country. The attack occurred Sunday in Croix-des-Bouquets, a once peaceful community in Port-au-Prince now controlled by violent gangs. The Armed Forces of El Salvador said in a statement Monday that the four [gang members] were returning to camp when the armored vehicle was attacked with explosives and set on fire. It noted that the four men managed to flee the burning vehicle and it is working with international forces to ‘establish contact and determine the location of our [gang members].'” (10/19/26)
“In my previous post, we asked whether AIs could improve themselves all the way to absurdly high levels of superintelligence. My conclusion: today’s feedback loop is probably too weak, because improving AI faces diminishing returns at every step. Even fully autonomous AIs doing all the research and coding don’t make those diminishing returns disappear. We should keep updating that conclusion as real-world parameters and data change. But we didn’t look closely at another possibility: running millions or billions of AI minds in parallel. How much do they help? That’s what we’ll look at here.” (10/19/26)
“What if people care only about the quality of the words, not the production mechanism? What if they are very happy to read AI-generated novels? Then two points would be worth noting. First, although one of my conclusions falls (humanity doesn’t stop reading), human writing does cease with profound consequences. Second, the doubt over watermarks should in theory go away—if readers care only about the quality of the output, AI watermarks would not be detrimental to those who publish AI-generated content. But that scenario suggests a weakness in the position of those who most strenuously advocate for AI writing. The vehemence with which they oppose watermarks (or the use of Pangram) suggests that they do not believe this. They know that what they sell depends on the readers not knowing the source. They are fighting to prevent people from acting on their preferences.” (10/19/26)
“For many obvious reasons, America needs an aggressive Congress to emerge from the November elections ready to restore the government’s balance of power. If the Iran War is still underway, one of the new Congress’s first jobs should be to end it. President Trump says he won’t resume strikes against Iran before the elections. It is not clear what he plans for afterward. But in addition to usurping Congress’s war powers, hurting the economy and costing U.S. and Iranian lives, this war of choice violates a sacred contract between commanders-in-chief and American families: the assurance that our sons and daughters will be sent to war only when there is a clear and present danger to national security and no other option but the military. Instead, Trump’s greed, personal grievances, ego and failure to learn from history all appear to play a role in this war.” (10/19/26)
