“The data center battle is about more than money, but one thing is clear: There are potentially massive financial benefits to individuals both as ratepayers and homeowners.” (09/14/26)
“Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations. So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. … Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected.” (09/15/26)
“Police apologists are often quick to minimize revelations of corruption and misconduct by law enforcement as ‘just a few bad apples.’ But the whole point of that adage is that a single bad apple can ruin all the other apples in the barrel. For the last 11 years and counting America has seen one of its two major political parties, its federal government, and much of the rest of society infested by a very large and very rotten spray-tanned apple. And the rot has spread far and wide.” (09/15/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“My main source of information on the war is the Institute for the Study of War website, which provides detailed daily reports based on satellite evidence of who is doing what where, official statements from both sides, and posts by Russian milbloggers. ISW is openly on the Ukrainian side, reports statements by sources in the Ukrainian military straight, statements from the Russian side more skeptically. … There are three different ways of interpreting the situation with different implications for the future of the war.” (09/14/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish & David Dayen
“The statement from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that AI ‘could kill us by the end of the decade’ has triggered the most hostile setting for sound public policy: mass panic. Events since Coxon’s viral comments have only deepened the frenzy. A senior employee at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, backed Coxon up (‘We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!’) and estimated the chances that AI could cause human extinction at more than 10 percent. Late last week, Anthropic said it had halted ‘several efforts by scientists’ whose research could have developed biological weapons, The New York Times reported; on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI’s artificial intelligence agents attacked the software service RubyGems two months before they attacked Hugging Face.” (09/15/26)
“Conservative [sic] YouTuber Nick Shirley has taken his anti-fraud crusade to California, but a recently passed law, coined by conservatives as the ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act,’ is threatening to derail him, or so he says. Now Shirley is challenging it in federal court. Shirley outlined his argument in a recent YouTube video, claiming that the legislation is a blatant violation of the First Amendment created in response to him exposing fraud across California. In his suit, he also alleges that it discriminates based on the content and viewpoint of speech and is unconstitutionally ‘overbroad and vague.'” (09/14/26)
“Blake, Lovecraft, and Tolkien – not to mention the original Celtic myths – all share a common theme: a deep ambivalence about technology which finally settles into determined opposition. … I was thinking about all this when trying to figure out why a mob of thousands of people terrorized north Britain in the 1810s while shouting ‘King Ludd! King Ludd!’ And why it took an army bigger than the one Wellington was leading against Napoleon to put them down. And why people regularly accuse me of being associated with them.” (09/14/26)