“In 2025, Owain Evans et al published a paper on ’emergent misalignment’. They trained a previously-aligned AI to do one immoral thing: write insecure code full of vulnerabilities and backdoors. To their surprise, the AI became immoral in general. Its advice to a bored user was to try taking random expired medications and see what happened. Its money-making tips all involved theft and violence. When asked for its favorite historic figure, it chose Hitler. … This sounds bad, in that random things can turn AIs evil or sexist. But some people in AI safety (including Eliezer Yudkowsky) speculated that in fact it was very, very good.” (09/22/26)
“Cape Girardeau County is the only first-class, non-charter county in Missouri without countywide planning and zoning. That fact, reported recently by Rick Fahr in the Southeast Missourian, is often cast as a deficiency waiting to be corrected. It shouldn’t be. It’s the result of voters being asked directly, more than once, and saying no both times.” (09/22/26)
“We seem to be living in the age of the autocrats, where Presidents Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin bestride the globe. The gathering this week of the U.N. General Assembly in New York seems a mere sideshow to the real power game at the Trump-Xi summit. But appearances can be deceptive: This may be the twilight of the dictators’ era, not the dawn.” (09/22/26)
“If the Left is serious about winning elections across the country, working-class voters must be at the center of this project. And yet, too many campaigns don’t make these voters’ priorities their focus. In a new report from The Center for Working Class Politics (where I am a research associate), scholars Joan Williams and Jared Abbot analyze the results of a recent Class Gaps Poll, which compares the political attitudes of working-class people with those of liberal upper-middle-class voters, who, like it or not, have steered the modern progressive movement and its agenda.” (09/22/26)
“The reasons the Trump White House has given in the past for its attempts to pick and choose which journalists are allowed to cover it have varied, but all of them have one thing in common: they cannot be reconciled with the law. Jim Acosta’s press pass was revoked because he continued to ask questions and refused to yield his microphone to another journalist. Brian Karem’s press pass was revoked essentially because he made remarks that were understood as rude and confrontational. The Associated Press was excluded because it used the label ‘Gulf of Mexico,’ rather than ‘Gulf of America.’ But these justifications for exclusion—like the more recent White House complaints about negative news coverage—fail, because they are empty and unworkable under the law.” (09/22/26)
“In their words and deeds, American politicians of both parties have confirmed what the polls show: Trump’s ‘populist’ tariffs are historically unpopular. Several lessons emerge. First, after winning on an affordability message in 2024, Trump’s early-term decision to repeatedly embrace a policy that, in both design and result, raises domestic prices was an epic political blunder. Voters now widely distrust Republicans’ handling of the economy. And defending tariffs by deriding inflation-weary Americans’ desire to have cheap and abundant goods added literal insult to injury. Second, voters’ hostility toward tariffs today reflects an important policy reality: Things that might sound good in a theoretical vacuum are often rejected when their real and predictable trade-offs become apparent.” (09/22/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“Given the judiciary’s longstanding reluctance to second-guess presidential power grabs involving national security, the national-security state has repeatedly used that deference to expand both its own reach and the power of the presidency. Call something a matter of national security and the normal rules start disappearing: Courts defer. Congress retreats. Secrecy expands. Executive power grows. ‘National security’ has been used as the justification for surveillance, secret courts, classification, warrantless spying, military intervention, watchlists, detention, border searches, censorship claims and the concealment of government misconduct. That game is hardly new. Nixon played it. Bush played it. Obama played it. Biden played it. Trump may not have invented the national-security dodge, but he has taken it to increasingly absurd extremes.” (09/22/26)
“If Iran’s near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a knife to international oil shipping’s throat, Houthi control of the Bab el-Mandeb is a firm grip on international oil shipping’s testicles. US president Donald Trump, it seems, would rather the Houthis didn’t squeeze. Or maybe he’s just trying to conserve limited military resources for continued war with Iran. Either way, when Saudi terror kingpin … er, Crown Prince … Mohammed bin Salman requested a new round of US airstrikes, the answer was ‘no, not this time.’ And either way, that’s the right answer.” (09/22/26)
“JD Vance’s admiration for Huey Long reveals how readily today’s populist right embraces the high spending and economic control it once condemned on the left.” (09/22/26)
“It is one of those bad ideas that seem compelling at first: If you’re running low on an essential item, why sell what little you have? And few items are more essential to a modern economy than diesel fuel. It powers trucks, trains, and boats, all of which are vital to moving goods from place to place. As diesel gets more expensive—it has never been more expensive than it is right now, in nominal terms—everything that must travel via truck, train, or boat gets more expensive too. This is no fun for anyone. Some Republicans think they have hit upon an easy solution: stop exporting diesel. … So far, the White House has not taken action. That’s good. Despite how it might seem, a ban on diesel exports would likely worsen an already bad situation by driving diesel prices higher.” (09/22/26)
