Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan
“I’ve had many great arguments with ChatGPT. But it’s worrisome that I almost always win. Often, it concedes that my contrarian view is 100% write. At minimum, it asymptotes to conceding that I’m 70% right. Most people characterize this [a]s ‘sycophancy bias.’ But the problem is deeper. Like almost all human beings, AIs are bad Bayesians.” (10/28/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“The truth is, as I laid out here earlier this year, that the war on Iran is not a drastic but necessary measure to thwart an imminent threat from a rogue regime. It’s just another military action, on top of all the others our government is carrying out, that is beneficial for a coalition of unique, well-connected interest groups—from the Israeli politicians who want to direct American power towards weakening their main regional rival to the domestic weapons companies getting paid to restock America’s dwindling munitions stockpiles.” (10/28/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/iran-midterms-and-myth-government-people
Source: The Next Move
by Jay Nordlinger
“Some Republican-aligned journalists said that they would be neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump. They would be neutral umpires, calling balls and strikes. Which sounds good—reasonable. But there were always problems with this approach. First, the umpires did not call every pitch. They were selective. Pitches that did not reflect well on Trump might not get called at all. Second, not all pitches are equal. The attempt to overturn an election is one pitch, I suppose. The deregulation of oil and gas, another. But you see how one thing crowds out—overwhelms—the other? This gets to the biggest problem with the balls-and-strikes approach: it may work with a normal politician, with a basic fitness for office and a basic respect for our constitutional order, but it cannot work with a Trump.” (10/28/26)
Source: The Intercept
by Liliana Segure & Jordan Smith
“[Charles] McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. … There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth. … In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as ‘thin,’ Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself ‘is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies.’ … Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison. … Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out.” (10/28/26)
https://theintercept.com/2026/10/28/bite-mark-forensics-junk-science-mccrory/
Source: New York Post
by Daniel Schatz
“Greta Thunberg recently traveled to France to applaud the protest movement. Wearing a black-and-white scarf associated with pro-Palestinian activism, she appeared outside a high school in a Paris suburb and lent her celebrity to demonstrations marred by rioting, arson and vandalism — with authorities already putting the damage at no less than $34 million. Thunberg brought the applause. Taxpayers were left to pay for the destruction. Her appearance fits a broader pattern of increasingly radical alliances and support for extremism. Before traveling to France, Thunberg had endorsed a motion declaring that ‘Zionism is racism’ adopted by Britain’s Green Party on Oct. 4. Her radical turn has been unfolding for years. Yet in progressive circles, she remains the Mother Teresa of the activist left — a secular saint whose moral authority is taken for granted and whose political judgment rarely faces scrutiny.” (10/28/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/greta-thunbergs-radical-turn-deserves-scrutiny-not-applause
Source: Law & Liberty
by Daniel Pitt
“Where, exactly, does the new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham stand on the political spectrum? President Donald Trump recently called him ‘extremely liberal’—indeed, he might even be called a ‘social democrat.’ Both Burnham’s ideological position and his background in local and, more importantly, urban politics influence his politics. But Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ is a far cry from the classically liberal Manchester School in economics of Richard Cobden and John Bright, the Ron Pauls of their day, who argued for laissez-faire economics and free trade. Indeed, the Labour leader’s ideology is not liberalism at all, but a repudiation of it.” (10/28/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Matthew K Reising
“Thomas F. Madden’s latest work is a needed primer on republican history and theory and an antidote to the democratic malaise dominating current discourse.” (10/28/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/losing-and-keeping-republics/
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Eldar Mamedov
“The continent played a crucial role in the JCPOA, but now it finds itself on the sidelines and supporting war.” (10/28/26)
Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker
“With soaring healthcare costs and a plunge in coverage rates, there is growing interest in Medicare for all. Polls show that a large majority of the public now favors a universal Medicare system, with even a substantial share of Republicans now backing it. A universal Medicare system has a huge amount to recommend it. Of course, the main point is to ensure that people can get the healthcare that they need, but it also eliminates a vast amount of waste in the national healthcare system.” (10/28/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/10/28/medicare-for-all-can-be-simple/
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Brad Pearce
“To the tech accelerationists, a human is little more than a particularly inefficient machine. The drive towards infinite automated customization demonstrates a lack of understanding about the extent to which humans are shaped by shared experience as well as being interested in the views of other humans. Art is valued because it is human expression. However, with their shallow understanding of humanity, they do not see the inherent uniqueness of humans compared to the robots they are trying to give ‘consciousness.’ … Currently, it is Pope Leo who seems to be taking the lead against recognizing AI as some sort of artificial humanity, and he may be the only person with the gravitas and imperviousness to being bought off to lead this fight for humanity.” (10/28/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/ai-can-never-have-rights