“AI apocalypse fears went mainstream last month after an Anthropic researcher resigned, saying the technology has more than a 10% chance of wiping out humanity. Leaders of AI companies called for a collective slowdown of development. In the process, the public learned that the tech industry’s conception of AI safety is dominated by a small group of people who believe, with a certainty and devotion resembling religion, that an artificial superintelligence will arrive soon and take over the world. Befitting that millenarian outlook, they appear to have an unhealthy internal culture, part of which sure looks like a sex cult.” (10/23/26)
“Universities are making a consequential concession: allowing privately owned generative AI systems into the very processes through which students learn to read, write, reason, and exercise judgment. Their adoption is increasingly presented as inevitable. AI exists, so higher education must adapt. Under this logic, adoption is expected, while refusal requires an explanation. But technological availability is not educational justification. Before reorganizing teaching and learning around these systems, universities should answer the question that advocates of adoption too often avoid: Why should AI be there at all? The language of inevitability obscures who is responsible.” [editor’s note: The language of inevitability is the language of fact; since AI exists, students will use it, end of story. No amount of whining about it will change it – TLK] (10/24/26)
“Sometimes you have to restate the obvious—dirty work, but someone has to do it: Another round of strikes is unlikely to accomplish this war’s stated political goals, which themselves change on a regular basis. While never-ending, mindless destruction for its own sake has its charms, I guess, generally speaking a war is supposed to accomplish something; the ‘something’ here has been at various times and non-exclusively the end of the Iranian nuclear program, reopening the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before the war), and regime change. The going theory among the teeming intellects downtown appears to be that yet another movement in the symphony of death, in concert with Scott Bessent’s exotic economic maneuvers, will get the Iranians to cry uncle and/or provoke a change of management in Tehran. Anything is possible, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.” (10/23/26)
“An uncanny strength of the second Trump administration has been its ability to be involved in so many scandals that no single one seems to become a dominant story. Take the most recent allegations about Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal defense attorney, who recently landed a plush gig working for Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan banker. Habba will get $50 million over five years to do unspecified work for a company that barely exists, according to The New York Times, while Herrera got a presidential pardon for a 2025 campaign finance charge. That’s just a typical day for the current White House, where the mingling of personal and public business has become routine.” (10/22/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“According to election polls, Democrats are fairly certain to take control over the U.S. House of Representatives. There is now also the possibility that they could take control over the U.S. Senate. Realizing the danger he faces of losing control over Congress, President Trump is barnstorming the country, doing his best to rally his MAGA supporters to go to the polls and vote. But a question naturally arises: If Trump becomes certain that he faces defeat next month, will he switch directions and simply suspend the midterm elections? After all, one cannot lose an election if no election is held.” (10/22/26)
“After leading with the theory of perfect competition, economics textbooks standardly add a ‘corrective’ chapter on the evils of monopoly. While they occasionally mention government-created monopoly, the focus is almost always on the harm of free-market monopoly, and the necessity of antitrust laws to combat such monopoly. A free-market monopoly is a business that manages to control a whole industry, and uses its control to slash output and raise prices. Later textbook chapters move on to markets with varying degrees of ‘monopoly power’ – and broadly conclude that as monopoly power goes up, market performance goes down. The moral: Free markets are only optimal in an extreme polar case. The further the real world strays from that case, the more suboptimal they become – and the more regulation improves the free-market outcome. Murray Rothbard rejects this picture, using three different sets of arguments.” (10/22/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“American farmers are in crisis, facing rising costs, disrupted export markets, and mounting financial pressure. While farming has always faced unavoidable challenges, such as weather, pests, and the vagaries of demand, the present problems are entirely of Washington’s making. The Trump administration’s tariffs have damaged critical trading relations, and its war against Iran has disrupted energy and fertilizer trade through the Strait of Hormuz. Washington’s response to beleaguered American agricultural interests has been billions of dollars in emergency aid and promises that future trade deals will deliver additional relief. It is a familiar cycle: Washington creates new risks for American producers, taxpayers absorb part of the resulting losses, and the underlying policies remain in place. Farmers receive temporary assistance but are left to navigate the same uncertain markets and elevated costs that made the assistance necessary.” (0/22/26)
“The United States continues to underwrite Europe’s security, forcing Washington to maintain an oversize military and risk American lives and wealth on behalf of prosperous, populous allies able to defend themselves. Yet the Europeans are ever less willing to follow American geopolitical dictates, despite enjoying a de facto subsidy for their more generous welfare states. And Trump’s commercial extortion hurts Americans more than it helps them, raising prices, distorting trade, and inflaming conflict. Washington should instead encourage the emergence of Europe as a friendly, if at times competitive, geopolitical player, able and ready to promote shared economic, political, and other international objectives.” (10/22/26)
“Barack Obama is like a firefighter parachuted in by the Democratic Party at times of crisis to put out fires. So when he weighed in on Sunday on the federal investigation of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar over potential allegations of immigration fraud and financial offenses, you just knew that the party is seriously worried about the national implications if she were to be indicted and potentially denaturalized and deported. Railing against the ‘appalling’ investigation, Obama claimed Omar was ‘a law-abiding elected official’ targeted because she ‘has dared to criticize the president’, and we should all be ‘outraged’ about the weaponization of the Justice Department. ‘It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say.’ That’s quite some chutzpah from the former president who launched the Russia-hoax persecutions of Trump.” (10/22/26)
