“One of the signature public service announcements of my youth was created by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America in 1987. A father finds a stash of pot and confronts his son: ‘Who taught you how to do this stuff?’ ‘You, all right!’ the kid snaps back. ‘I learned it by watching you!’ I am bound by the AP Stylebook to not anthropomorphize artificial intelligence. But I can imagine these very words being uttered by the agents that hacked Hugging Face, or the models that engaged in tens of thousands of incidents of, in the new euphemism of the time, ‘misalignment’. This refers to AI stepping beyond guardrails set up by researchers during both internal and real-world testing.” (09/29/26)
“In the years before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the descent of much of Europe into ‘the Great War’, most of the ideologues on the Left assumed that such a war was an impossibility. The workers of the world, they believed, would no longer go to war against one another. Their class solidarity was too strong, far stronger than their national allegiance and their fidelity to artificial borders and superficial ethnic differences. Engels, for one, thought the old ways had been thoroughly demystified and discredited. The ‘new man’ (the Communist man) was better than the old man, more organized and less aggressive toward his own kind. Darwin, Engels insisted, had described ‘a struggle for existence’ that applied to the animal kingdom, not to the expected Communist society.” (09/28/26)
“Organizing and running elections in the United States is left to individual states to determine and oversee. But this month alone, the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on these processes multiple times. On Sept. 14, it issued a one-paragraph concurrence limiting proposed federal changes to mail-in voting. Earlier this week, Missouri’s redistricted voting map was back on the emergency docket for the third time this month. And on Friday, the court ruled to allow use of a vast federal database to check voter eligibility. Amid the legalese and partisan arguments surrounding such cases, American voters are both confused and concerned about the trustworthiness of the country’s election processes. According to two recent surveys, the share who believe that November midterms will be ‘fair’ ranges from 49% to 55%.” (09/26/26)
“Metal mixtures found in the leftover smoke, ash and debris from the deadly 2023 Maui wildfires were harmful to the lung health of people living nearby long after the burning ended, a new study says. The work shows that major wildfires, which are worsening with the planet’s warming, could have lasting effects beyond immediate exposure. Post-wildfire air quality needs to be monitored longer term, the research suggests, and recovery efforts need to consider what might remain in contaminated soot, residue and dirt well after burning stops. The wildfires, caused by wind spreading a brushfire spurred by downed power lines, burned on the Hawaiian island of Maui in August 2023, destroyed the town of Lahaina and killed more than 100 people.” (09/28/26)
“October is when hype meets reality. In baseball, the final teams are sorted out for the playoffs, and your football teams are well into the winnowing-out process for the Super Bowl. For court nerds, the start of the October term at the Supreme Court can have a similar dynamic, as long-watched cases finally come up for oral argument. Although the court continues to accept cases on a rolling basis, this term is looking like another blockbuster, with cases that range from climate change to gun rights to parental rights. The odds of making the oral argument docket make the NFL season look like a walk in the park. After thousands of petitions, the Supreme Court accepts on average between 70-80 cases for the coveted ‘writ of certiorari.'” (09/28/26)
“Apple has been ordered to pay $5.7bn (£4.3bn) in damages after a US jury found it had used another firm’s tech without permission. Audio firm Taction Technology claimed in 2021 that Apple had infringed two of its patents for haptics systems, which enable vibrations for actions such as receiving a message or pressing a button. This tech is built into devices like the iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple said it had not used Taction’s vibration tech and would appeal the verdict. ‘While we thank the jury for their consideration, we strongly disagree with today’s verdict and the damages awarded, which are entirely unsupported by the facts,’ it said. ‘Apple’s Taptic Engine is fundamentally different from Taction’s technology, which Taction’s own testing of Apple’s products confirmed during trial.'” (09/28/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The Wall Street Journal has a new article out titled ‘Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?’ about the rising levels of family estrangement in our society. ‘Many experts believe that estrangements between adult children and their parents are becoming an epidemic in the U.S., just like divorce in the 1970s,’ writes Elizabeth Bernstein. ‘Much like then, the movement is driven by a convergence of large societal trends — this time the rise of social-media algorithms, changing therapeutic approaches and a broadening definition of trauma.’ As has become the fashion these days, Bernstein largely pins the blame for this phenomenon on TikTok. ‘Last month, more than 138,000 new videos that mentioned cutting off or going low-contact with parents were posted on TikTok, up more than 10-fold compared with August 2020,’ Bernstein writes, adding that ‘More than 82% of the posts were by women.'” (09/28/26)
“North Korea used its yearly U.N. platform on Monday to warn other world leaders of ‘a harsh reality rampant with unprecedented mutual distrust and confrontation,’ but said that it would endure and, in a multilateral world, ‘surely attain all that we plan to, relying entirely on our own efforts.’ It was, by Pyongyang’s standards, a relatively mild speech that contained no direct threats. The annual opportunity for the country, whose formal name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to speak on the world stage fell this year to Vice Foreign Minister Kim Son Gyong. Like many nations, he touted the notion of U.N.-focused multilateralism, yet repeatedly insisted that North Korea could — and would, if necessary — go it alone.” (09/28/26)
“The coming midterms lay bare a divide that runs deeper than policy and older than any party platform. Beneath every debate sits a single question, and it is the question on which this election turns: Who do you trust to run your life, you or the government? House Republicans’ answer is our closing argument. The current Republican majority arrived in Congress in January 2025 and spent the next 20 months answering that question. After record highs of hundreds of thousands of illegals [sic] streaming over the southwest border into the country under President Joe Biden, we’ve slammed the door shut. We now have the most secure border in modern American history. Families in El Paso, Texas, no longer worry about migrants roaming the streets at night.” [editor’s note: Yes, Republicans certainly answered that question — but not in anything like the way McClain seems to be claiming – TLK](09/28/26)
“The UK is in talks with US authorities over a potential stoppage of diesel exports and has started preparing for a ban, Chancellor John Healey has told BBC News. Diesel prices in the UK reached a new high on Monday due to supply pressures springing from the US-Israel conflict with Iran and Russia’s war with Ukraine. Fuel prices are rising globally and US President Donald Trump has threatened to ban diesel exports, stating at the weekend: ‘We’re thinking about it very seriously’. Healey, who admitted that UK diesel prices are ‘extreme’, said the government was in discussions with the US, adding: ‘We’re also making the provision that we may need to and we have our own stocks in the UK.’ Speaking on the sidelines of the annual Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, Healey said: ‘We work very closely with the Americans’. (09/28/26)
