“AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google are facing allegations of collusion following recent calls for a coordinated slowdown of AI development, according to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court Friday. The complaint claims that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s public plea earlier this month for ‘industry-wide coordination’ to ‘pace the frontier’ of AI advancement, which drew agreement from SpaceXAI head Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, amounted to an illegal business agreement between competitors under U.S. antitrust law.” (09/18/26)
“Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the great English individualist and classical liberal, emphasized that societies based on contract, unlike societies based on status and coercion, blossom with creative diversity. (How wokeism has corrupted that word in our time!) Free association bestows countless benefits on all socioeconomic levels. Paradoxically, greater individuality accompanies growing interdependence through specialization, the division of labor, and trade. Self-sufficiency is the way to stay poor. The result of industrialism, Spencer wrote, is general affluence and a fading away of coercion.” (09/18/26)
“Ed Sheeran was overcome with emotion as he apologized to fans during his return to the stage Saturday following backlash after Macklemore was dropped from his tour. … ‘Now, I want to address the question of where I stand in the situation in Israel and Palestine and whether this concert here tonight implies where I stand. I’ve tried in my career not to be a political commentator of any kind, because I want my music and shows to be about unity not division, about humanity not politics. But this is a humanitarian issue and I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore. What happened in Israel at a … music festival on Oct. 7 was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate.'” (09/19/26)
“While we’ve grown used to public school educators fiddling with grades, exams like those currently required — even if far from perfect — constitute an even better way to glean how well (or badly) teachers and students are doing. Government schools suffer, of course, from ‘increased spending and mediocre results,’ as Reason puts it. (I covered Michigan’s problems yesterday, for example.) The avoidance of ‘metrics’ — in business lingo — is just the kind of evasion that one might expect from under-performing institutions. New York’s opt-in downgrade is comparable to a failing student doctoring his report card or forging a parent’s signature.” (09/18/26)
“A rights groups says the Israeli government is forging ahead with a contentious [squat] expansion plan that would effectively divide the occupied West Bank, a plan long criticized as a threat to the viability of a future Palestinian state. On Wednesday, Israeli rights group Ir Amim said Israel’s government will open the bidding for an additional 2,167 units in a [squat] project that would effectively cut the West Bank in two. … [Squat] development in this open tract of land east of Jerusalem known as E1 is especially contentious because it runs from the outskirts of Jerusalem deep into the occupied West Bank.” (09/18/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Jared Walczak
“A recent tax court ruling in Maryland pours cold water on a tax proposal championed in Michigan by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The Maryland Tax Court struck down that state’s first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax, ruling that it violated the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, as well as the interstate commerce and due process clauses of the US Constitution. Lawsuits have also been filed in Utah and Illinois, which adopted their own digital advertising taxes earlier this year.” (09/18/26)
“Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former Republican who is facing an uphill reelection battle after losing most of his district due to redistricting, said he won’t caucus with his former party if he wins in November. The announcement came Wednesday during a forum hosted by Semafor, where Kiley doubled down on his move to abandon his party if reelected. He said that would include him losing access to agenda-setting decisions with the Republican Party and mean he would lose his seat on key committees. Kiley said he’s trying to change those rules so independents aren’t automatically blocked. … Kiley, who is 41 and has served two House terms, captured national attention in March when he announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and was instead running as an independent,after Californians overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50.” (09/18/26)
