Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Karthik Sankaran
“Sen. Chuck Grassley has endorsed a moratorium thinking it will provide more fuel the states, particularly famers. Not so fast, say experts.” (09/23/26)
Source: The Americn Conservatives
by Jude Russo
“he UN is, if not quite a punchline, at least not an institution with oodles of heft in 2026. Maybe it never was, really; as far as preventing international conflict goes, it was broken to begin with. At the same time, the leader of the free world showing up to the body’s annual General Assembly and going on one about the various wars he has started without so much as a how-do-you-do to the international community is a fresh strain. Most of President Donald Trump’s Tuesday address to the congregation was devoted to self-congratulation about American aggression.” (09/23/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trump-to-world-to-the-victor-belong-the-spoils/
Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton
“George Takei (Star Trek Original Series actor, well-known flaming liberal/Woke celebrity) recently pointed out that there are some 15 million AR15s in the US, and that if every one of them were shipped off to Ukraine and given to their citizens, they could easily defeat the Russian invasion. You know what, my friend? I completely agree with him. Do you? Good. Ironically, he just proved the entire point of the 2nd Amendment.” (09/22/26)
https://thepriceofliberty.org/2026/09/22/thoughts-on-weapons-and-disarmament/
Source: American Greatness
by Sasha Gong
“Xi Jinping is preparing to visit the United States. Washington will focus on artificial intelligence, tariffs, rare earths, supply chains, and trade. Behind these discussions lies a common assumption: China is still rising—a disciplined superpower capable of challenging America for decades. That may be true. But Washington may also be repeating the mistake the West made with the Soviet Union. After the Soviet collapse, briefly opened archives allowed Western intelligence officials to reassess decades of analysis. Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, offered an ironic summary: ‘We tried to find out what the Soviet leaders knew. Finally, we found out that they did not know much. They didn’t even know that their country would soon collapse.'” (09/23/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/23/are-we-once-again-overestimating-an-authoritarian-superpower/
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“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)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mysteries-of-ai-generalization
Source: Show-Me Institute
by Patrick Tuohey
“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)
https://showmeinstitute.org/article/economy/cape-girardeau-county-has-voted-no-on-zoning-twice/
Source: Washington Post
by David Ignatius
“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)
Source: In These Times
by Mindy Isser
“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)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/working-class-politics-left-election-midterms-college
Source: Cato Institute
by Dan Greenberg
“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)
https://www.cato.org/blog/presidents-ban-journalists-disgraceful-illegal
Source: Washington Post
by Scott Lincicome
“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)