“In May 2024, a New York City jury convicted Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of 34 felonies of falsifying business records with an intent to defraud, including an intent to ‘commit, aid, or conceal another crime’. Days earlier, Justice Juan Merchan had convened counsel for a pre-charge conference to discuss their recommendations for jury instructions. There, Trump’s defense team, led by Todd Blanche, failed to propose a key legal requirement for what the prosecution called the ‘most obvious’ other crime: conspiracy to promote an election through the ‘unlawful means’ of violating Federal Election Campaign Act contribution limits. Under reigning federal precedents, there could be no criminal violation of FECA unless the conduct was ‘willful’ (defined as ‘knowing it was unlawful’). Yet the defense put forth the term ‘willfully’ without saying what it meant!” (09/17/26)
“As is usual when someone details the vileness of slavery we get the claim that, well, it financed the current richness of the world: ‘That complicity helped shape modern Britain, Lester said. Plantation profits helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, railways, public health, welfare, universities, schools, church building and the public finances.’ Therefore everyone who benefits from the current richness of the world must cough up trillions to compensate. We do not agree with the base claim, obviously. Everywhere had slavery and only the one place had that first Industrial Revolution. It’s therefore not slavery that was the special spark that triggered the IR: QED. But, OK, let us accept the point in order to be able to explore it. Slavery did lead to the richness of the modern world. That means that anyone in this modern world benefitted from slavery.” (09/17/26)
“Missouri has a teacher shortage. Just ask anyone. Except the actual teacher shortage problem is different from what many people assume. In our new paper on Missouri’s teacher pipeline, James Shuls and I show that the state’s teacher labor market does not indicate a broad shortage of teachers. Since 2013, Missouri has hired 4,000 teachers while public school enrollment has fallen by almost 30,000 students. The shortage pressure appears to be coming from specific high-need subject areas and schools.” (09/16/26)
“The war in the Middle East keeps getting worse for President Donald Trump. The campaign to defeat Iran and establish a new order in the Middle East that left Tehran’s allies marginalized has imploded spectacularly. … ‘Don’t worry,’ politicians and war hawks told Americans, ‘Trump has a winning strategy.’ They argued that the Iranian economy and the Strait of Hormuz really weren’t all that important to the global oil market. They claimed that the ‘panicans’ were alarming their fellow Americans over nothing. ‘Sure, oil can’t get through the Strait of Hormuz, but Saudi Arabia can pump the oil to the Red Sea via its East-West pipeline.’ However, that plan literally went up in smoke last week.” (09/27/26)
“It’s reasonable to ask how AI might kill us all. We can answer that question on several levels. At the first level, AI can kill humans in the same way that humans kill humans. AI is already being used in lethal ways …. At a second level, we should remember that AI is native to computer systems; that’s where it lives. And these computer systems are increasingly in charge of everything that we do. … But at the highest level, none of these details about how AI might kill us matter. The thing that is dangerous about AI is that it could become massively more intelligent than us, and so massively more capable of controlling the environment in any number of ways.” (09/16/26)
“Pharmaceutical forecasting is untested, and the FDA is a conservative organization. Decision makers would not and should not uproot their usual process in favor of a forecasting-based one. We envision applying forecasting to the FDA gradually, increasing its prominence only after low-commitment applications have visibly succeeded. … This summer, as part of its Operation Trialblazer clinical trial reform initiative, the Trump administration announced a pilot program to speed up phase 1 trials. Incorporating forecasting into that pilot would be a concrete way of implementing this initial stage. The FDA could either employ human forecasters, partner with an AI superforecasting company, or create their own in-house software; results from this first stage would be used to calibrate its effectiveness.” (09/16/26)
“Many narratives swirl around the U.S. war with Iran as the November 3 midterm elections loom. The Left is giddy with confidence that Democrats may take control of Congress. It is therefore planning a circus of impeachments, lawfare, and investigations to neuter the last two years of the Trump administration. High gas prices and the current unpopularity of the Iran conflict, coupled with the historical reality that the president’s party has lost seats in Congress in 39 of the last 41 midterm elections, have convinced Democrats that they could win enough seats to cut off funds for the war. Yet the elections are still seven weeks away, and the sheer number of known unknowns ensures an uncertain outcome. Every side is now gaming the midterms. The Democrats believe the unpopular war can at last halt Trump’s momentum and are already declaring it all but lost. The Iranian theocracy agrees.” (09/17/26)
“A visit by perennial Trump administration negotiators Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, followed immediately by one to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Donald Trump’s claim that a ceasefire in that war is imminent might make critics suspicious of another administration attempt to pressure Ukraine for major concessions to end that bloody war, this time in exchange for a Russian stand-down in helping Iran in the administration’s war with that country. Any such obvious mutually advantageous deal could help both Russia and the United States at Ukraine’s expense.” (09/17/26)
“The phobia against human judgment is America’s unspoken taboo. As a result, the American state is floundering. The evils of bureaucratic micromanagement include: inability to adapt to new circumstances (sluggish defense procurement), diversion to rule compliance instead of doing the job (doctors and nurses spend half their time on desk work), loss of a sense of individual agency and pride (why bother when drowning in law?) and listless public cultures.” (09/16/26)
“No one today can think Jefferson to have been morally upright in all that he did. His writings and his work to achieve a liberal society—in some areas—are impossible to reconcile with his enslavement of other human beings, or the particularly cruel ways that he treated them. And yet he stands at the founding of our country. His proudest accomplishments survive, and it falls to us to explain how such a man could contain such contradictions.” (09/16/26)
