“Families with young children are potentially eligible for dozens of public benefits to support them during periods of unemployment and to supplement their earnings during periods of employment. Access to these benefits varies depending on earnings, marital status, age of the children, and where families reside. This patchwork across programs and states is so complex that social scientists, advocates, and policymakers often narrow their focus to examine a single program in isolation. While this gives a clear view of the impact of any one program, it risks missing the forest for the trees.” (09/08/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Wanjiru Njoya
“Property rights are defined in many ways. It often happens that academics who are interested in the scope, regulation, or protection of private property rights debate endlessly at cross purposes because they do not share the same definition of property rights in the first place. Some debaters attempt to beat their opponents by initiating a definitional game of ‘gotcha.'” (09/08/260
“Leftists are coming for your kids. They always have been, so that’s not breaking news, but you have to be reminded of this on occasion so no one forgets and everyone can act accordingly. Kids are easy to indoctrinate; easy to convince of stupid things, that lies are truth. If you have kids, you know how this works. I’d never realized how easily you could joke and have everything you say be taken seriously by your kid because they don’t really understand the concept of joking yet. Once they get it, they can still be convinced of just about anything by anyone in a position of authority or someone they’re told to respect. Most adults don’t abuse that position, but liberals do.” [editor’s note: I didn’t know Hunter was a “liberal!” – TLK] (09/08/26)
“The failures of America’s war on terror were rooted in a misdiagnosis of the problem. The Bush administration promoted the idea that the 9/11 hijackers were motivated by their hatred of American values and rejected any notion that U.S. policies contributed to either anti-American sentiment or violent extremism. ‘They’ hated us for who we are, it was argued, not what we do. … While the intent of the American military strategy was to deny terrorist groups safe havens, the practical effect was the opposite. American military interventions destabilized entire regions and created the kind of lawless anarchy in which militant groups proliferated. U.S. interventions also exacerbated anti-American sentiments and allowed militant groups to portray themselves as nationalist defenders fighting an occupying enemy.” (09/08/26)
“Mechanistic interpretability is the science of ‘reading an AI’s mind’. Large language models are ‘grown, not built’. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how. But a neural network is just a set of simulated neurons on a computer. The person with the computer can see the neurons, the connections between them, and which ones activate when the AI answers questions. So it seems like it should be possible to ‘reverse engineer’ the AI. … Unfortunately this is very hard.” (09/08/26)
“Two terms, dozens of announced withdrawals, and the Army’s brigades are still unpacking their gear in Europe, the Pacific, and beyond. Rhetoric about restraint and retrenchment is one thing; the discipline to see it through is another. On that score, the Trump administration has been exactly what its critics always suspected: all talk, no action.” (09/08/26)
“American forces are conducting combat operations in South America right now. If that comes as news, it is because the administration has disclosed the mission only in fragments, and Congress has not forced a public accounting. United States Green Berets are operating alongside Ecuadorian forces in the northern province of Esmeraldas in what the provincial governor described as joint operations against ‘narcoterrorism.’ Neither government has said which organizations the ground operations are targeting, what the troops are doing or how many Americans are involved.” (09/08/26)
“The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement gives Riyadh a pathway to enrich uranium on its own soil, and in doing so the potential for a Saudi nuclear Bomb. To placate fears Wright has put enrichment years down the road but not in doubt. Wright is describing the document. Trump is describing a country he is at war with to prevent from doing exactly this.” (09/08/260
“Summer passed. People traveled, went into nature, spent time with family, laughed, rested, and enjoyed life—and that is a good thing. Now school has started again, and children are walking back into classrooms with backpacks, excitement, and plans for another year. But for many families, there is no return to normal. Since the war in Iran began earlier this year, civilians have been killed, injured, displaced, and traumatized. Sometimes their stories reach us. Sometimes they barely break through the noise. I still think about the girls’ elementary school in Minab, where more than 100 children were killed. They were children. Students. We call children ‘angels’, and then somehow their deaths become another statistic of war.” (09/08/26)
