September 30, 2026

ADAM THIERER: What Hayek Can Teach Us About AI Safety.

This is where a dose of Hayekian thinking is particularly useful. Hayek would tell us that AI alignment is not a computable math equation, and that efforts to treat it as such will lead to the sort of authoritarian thinking and proposals we witnessed with previous efforts to remake economies and humanity according to some grand design.

In his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Hayek warned of the “pretence of knowledge,” or the belief that experts understand society well enough to direct everyone else’s choices according to their supposedly enlightened plans. He argued that the “limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

Hayek teaches us that technical “alignment” can be a pretext for dangerous political control of our economy and liberties. Empowering global elites to guide humanity’s acceptable risks and technological future raises other risks in the process. Aligned with whose values? Imposed by whose authority? And at what cost? “Progress by its very nature cannot be planned,” Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, but instead “civilization [is] the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error,” and “the sum of experience.”

As a general rule, put your guard up whenever powerful people suggest a political solution to a technical problem.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

PRETTY MUCH, YEAH:

Posted at 3:32 pm by Stephen Green

KRUISER: Dems’ Haplessness Makes Them an Even Bigger Existential Threat to the Republic. “What does worry me, though, is that the Democrats are not unlike an unhinged, cornered rabid animal these days. Because it’s now a party dominated by coastal elites, there is also an almost feral quality when Dem politicians are out in normal America. There is a complete lack of regard for civility and convention that makes them unpredictable and dangerous.”

Posted at 3:19 pm by Stephen Green

MONITOR YOUR HEALTH: KardiaMobile. #CommissionEarned

Posted at 3:02 pm by Helen Smith

EAT MORE MEAT: Nearly a third of Americans eating fewer fresh vegetables after ‘explosive diarrhea’ virus outbreak.

Nearly a third of Americans cut back their produce consumption and nearly two-thirds changed their behavior this summer after an “explosive diarrhea” parasite ravaged rectums across the country, according to a poll.

At least 30% of people said they were buying less fresh produce at grocery stores over the cyclosporiasis parasite outbreak, which left tens of thousands of people cramping on their commodes from vicious bouts of viscous diarrhea.

I like to think I was ahead of the curve on this one. Way out ahead of the curve.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK:

In-flight Starlink ought to be industry standard — it’s just that good.

Posted at 2:01 pm by Stephen Green

CHANGE: Airbus A350F Makes First Flight. “Airbus’ next-generation A350F freighter, which the manufacturer confirmed to be under development in July 2021, has finally conducted its maiden flight.”

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN TO HATE WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES TO CAPITALISM:

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Anti-Gun Orgs Bullied YouTube Into Squeezing Gun Content Creators Even Harder. “Gun control advocates appear to have succeeded in pushing YouTube to change its policies to restrict firearm-related content and tighten its rules governing manufacturer-supported videos. Is it just a coincidence? The implications extend beyond whether “GunTubers” can publish a product review. They reach the increasingly consequential question of when independent firearm coverage becomes corporate advertising.”

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

DANIEL GREENFIELD: Bari Weiss is Destroying CBS News.

It would be awful indeed if Bari Weiss were to tamper with the journalistic legacy of CBS greats like Walter Cronkite, Les Moonves (accused of forcing a woman into oral sex), former 60 Minutes Executive Producer Jeff Fager (accused of sexually harassing women), former 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose (accused of sexually harassing women), former 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt (accused of sexually harassing women) making “accused of sexually harassing women” into an official requirement for CBS News legends.

At least there was Dan Rather, who broke the network’s curse of sexually harassing women by merely trying to pass off a Microsoft Word document as if it had come from the Vietnam War.

Obviously, Bari Weiss doesn’t belong at CBS News. She hasn’t even raped anyone yet.

Read the whole thing.

When Dick Ebersol returned to produce Saturday Night Live after Jean Dumainian’s disastrous stint replacing Lorne Michaels in 1980, one of his first hires was original head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who returned because he wanted to give the show a “‘decent Viking funeral.’ He thought it would be fun to see the show go out in a blaze of glory, to make one last courageous charge into the banal maw of network TV,” according to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad in their 1986 book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. With the legacy media fading into senescence in general, perhaps Weiss can actually accomplish a well-deserved Götterdämmerung at the formerly self-described “Tiffany Network.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MASKS OFF:

Posted at 12:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“ALTERCATION” IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE TERRORIST HIJACKINGS WE THWART TOGETHER:

The Community Notes are appropriately brutal, if you’d like to vote them to Helpful status.

Posted at 11:57 am by Stephen Green

SHADES OF 9/11: FlyDubai Pilot Attempts Hijacking, Mass Destruction.

Imagine if Flight 93 had had a happy ending. Israel and Saudi Arabia may have just experienced their own version, 25 years later.

The Wall Street Journal reports cautiously on what appears to be a terrorist hijacking over Israel. Their report notes a “struggle” in the cockpit, a steep dive, and an intervention by passengers to resolve it:

Pilots on a FlyDubai flight to Israel were injured after a struggle in the cockpit that sent the plane into a steep dive before it made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.

FlyDubai, the sister airline to the long-haul carrier Emirates, didn’t explain what happened in the flight for the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, only saying that it “experienced an incident while en route.” Flight FZ1073 landed in Tabuk in western Saudi Arabia and “all passengers are safe and accounted for,” the carrier added.

A statement from the Tabuk airport said “the captain and the co-pilot sustained injuries and were transported to the hospital for necessary medical care.” It did not elaborate on the cause of the injuries.

Itzhak Liber, a person who identified himself on his Facebook page as being a passenger on the flight, said in a video from the plane that an attacker stabbed a pilot. Liber said some on board had stepped in and removed the attacker from the cockpit.

The Times of Israel has a much more robust account of the attempted hijacking. The terrorist turns out to be the FlyDubai co-pilot, hired less than a year earlier, on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. After stabbing the captain, the co-pilot dove the plane 17,000 feet until passengers breached the cockpit and saved their own lives, not to mention whatever the co-pilot may have aimed the plane at in Saudi Arabia or Israel[.]

More here: Flydubai Co-Pilot Stabs Captain Midair — Israeli Passengers Subdue Him Before the Plane Can Crash.

Not surprisingly, this gentleman is rather elated to have survived:

UPDATE: Pilot ‘stabbed’ in suspected hijacking of Israel-bound passenger flight.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said one of the pilots “stabbed the other pilot and apparently tried to crash the plane” on the Flydubai plane.

He described how a passenger and a member of the crew managed to “neutralise” the co-pilot while another crew member took control of the plane.

The suspected assailant is in custody and currently being questioned by the Saudi authorities, he added.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, said the incident showed Israel must continue its war efforts.

He said: “Thank God and the heroic passengers, but Israel’s security doctrine must be taken to the next level. We must not stop and must continue until achieving total victory in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and Judea and Samaria.”

Exit quote: “Mr Ben-Gvir, also a member of the security cabinet, said: ‘The naive notion that our enemies value life and that we should have mercy on them was met with another reminder this morning in the form of a terrorist who planned to crash a plane and murder the 180 Israelis on board.’”

Meanwhile as far as the Gray Lady is concerned, its origin and purpose, still a total mystery:

MORE:

Posted at 11:45 am by Ed Driscoll

ROBERT G. NATELSON: The Slippery Constitutionality of Open Primaries.

Open and semi-closed primary laws have been around for some time. However, in recent years they have proliferated, promoted mostly by center-left organizations.

The most salient stated goal for promoting these laws is to favor “moderate” candidates who “appeal to a wider portion of the electorate” over more “extreme” and “partisan” candidates. The promoting organizations contend that parties must accept such restrictions in exchange for state financing of primary elections. Constitutional wonks may recognize that the latter argument disregards the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional conditions doctrine: A state may not force you to give up a constitutional right in order to receive a government benefit.

I suspect that the sponsors’ primary goal is to affect GOP primaries. Outside a few regions where socialists can win intra-Democratic Party races, most Democrat primaries display few real policy differences. It is in Republican contests where the real debate happens. The goal of the promoters seems to be to prevent strongly conservative or government-cutting candidates from getting to the general election ballot—or, if they cannot prevent that, to force those candidates to temper their message.

An instance of the latter effect recently came to light in the Colorado lawsuit, where several Republican candidates asked the court not to mandate an immediate change back to a closed primary because they had fashioned their nomination campaigns for an electorate that included liberal independents as well as Republicans.

In a November 6, 2025 Law & Liberty essay—written well before the new SCOTUS decision in National Republican—I contended that open and semi-open primary laws were likely unconstitutional.

Fascinating article on a topic that doesn’t get much attention.

I’ve never understood what a party is supposed to be, if just anybody can select its candidates.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green