Way back in May 2024, I wrote about Miller v. McDonald. Amish parents challenged New York's vaccine mandate on Free Exercise Clause grounds. In December 2025, the Supreme Court GVR'd the case in light of Mahmoud. Unsurprisingly, the New York courts thought Mahmoud changed nothing. The case is now back before the Supreme Court. A cert petition was filed on September 28.

The New York Times covered the case in an article titled, "Amish Families Pushed to Undo a Vaccine Law. Then Measles Arrived." The undercurrent of the article is that Amish children deserve to become sick because their parents did not vaccinate them. The New York Health commissioner made this point expressly:

In a petition filed on Sept. 28, the Amish asked the U.S. Supreme Court to force New York to grant religious exemptions to immunization rules, as most states do. A previous ruling gave the Amish reason to think they might have a chance at prevailing.

But then a wave of measles cases began sweeping through Amish communities. Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a statewide health emergency this month after more than 100 people fell ill with measles.

"Perhaps Mother Nature, by delivering a measles outbreak in New York's Amish community coincident with this case returning to the Supreme Court, is her not-so-subtle hint," said Dr. Howard Zucker, who was state health commissioner when New York eliminated religious exemptions.

If only the Amish people chose the state over their religion, and took the hint, they wouldn't have so many sick children! I am appalled by Zucker's arrogance and hostility to religion. He is stating that "Mother Nature" is sending a signal to the Amish that adhering to their religion is making children sick. In effect, nature is punishing the Amish for not submitting to Kathy Hochul.

Chief Justice Burger described this unique community in the Supreme Court's unanimous Wisconsin v. Yoder decision:

The history of the Amish sect was given in some detail, beginning with the Swiss Anabaptists of the 16th century, who rejected institutionalized churches and sought to return to the early, simple, Christian life deemphasizing material success, rejecting the competitive spirit, and seeking to insulate themselves from the modern world. As a result of their common heritage, Old Order Amish communities today are characterized by a fundamental belief that salvation requires life in a church community separate and apart from the world and worldly influence. This concept of life aloof from the world and its values is central to their faith.

A related feature of Old Order Amish communities is their devotion to a life in harmony with nature and the soil, as exemplified by the simple life of the early Christian era that continued in America during much of our early national life. Amish beliefs require members of the community to make their living by farming or closely related activities. Broadly speaking, the Old Order Amish religion pervades and determines the entire mode of life of its adherents. Their conduct is regulated in great detail by the Ordnung, or rules, of the church community.

It is especially awful for Zucker to weaponize "Mother Nature" (capital letters) against a people whose life is devoted to "harmony with nature."

This is not the first time New York has accused insular religious communities of spreading diseases. In October 2020, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo shared a photograph of religious Jews congregating in close quarters as evidence they were spreading the disease. He said, "I'm going to say to the orthodox community tomorrow if you don't agree then we will have to close down your religious institutions." The only problem was that the photograph was from the 2006 funeral of Hassidic rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum. And the photo wasn't even from New York City. It was taken in the Orange County village of Kiryas Joel. This charge really isn't new. Jews were blamed for the spreading of the Bubonic Plague, among other pandemics.

The Times gestures at the religious reasons why the Amish oppose the vaccines:

But many Amish families regard vaccine mandates — and government intrusion in their schools — as a greater threat to the health of their community than measles. Their religion calls for adherents to live together in tightknit religious communities apart from the modern world and its influences.

"Our almighty God wants us to fully put our faith and trust in him, which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines," Ezra Wengerd, an Amish leader who represents the 26 families that send their children to the three schools, told a judge in 2022.

The Amish have been practicing their faith for more than three centuries and have principled reasons to oppose vaccines. Indeed, the Amish have a far stronger case to object to vaccines than many people who made up their beliefs during the pandemic. Shame on the New York government for singling out this tradition in such hostile terms.

Zucker and others do not seem to know or care what it means to place faith in a higher power. Instead, Zucker thinks Mother Nature is seeking retribution against the Amish children.

Yet, perhaps we should be grateful. This sort of statement should feature prominently in future briefing. Indeed, Zucker demonstrates the sort of hostility we've seen in past victories for religious liberty. In the leadup to Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a government official said that "things have changed since 100 yearsago," and "it would be great if we followed the teachings of Pope Francis, the voice of the Catholic Church." And in Masterpiece Cakeshop, a commissioner said "Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust." These statements are prima facie evidence of religious hostility.

So thank you Mr. Zucker. You've made the odds of your state losing far greater.

People sometimes ask me whether I would ever want to live in New York again. The answer is 1000% no. This state consistently exhibits so much hostility towards people of faith. Here in Texas, some people object to posting the Ten Commandments on the wall of classrooms as some evidence of hatred. But no piece of paper can compare to the overt disdain towards traditional religions that people like Zucker and Cuomo demonstrate. So long as religious people get vaccinated and attend services on Zoom, they are in good standing with the government. But as soon as any person of faith deigns to disagree with elite opinions, then Gaia will seek vengeance.

These people are living in an episode of Captain Planet. (I cringe that as a child I absorbed this Turnerfied propaganda.)

The post NY Health Commissioner Says "Mother Nature" Is Punishing Amish Children With Measles Outbreak appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Of all the arguments for protectionism, the infant industry argument probably has the strongest theoretical appeal. By protecting a new industry from its more developed foreign competition, the story goes, tariffs give domestic producers the time to grow, learn, and become efficient enough to stand on their own. Domestic consumers feel the short-term pains of higher prices, but they enjoy the long-term gains of job growth and lower prices as the new industry blossoms.

It's no secret that tariffs have driven significant price increases over the last year and a half. A study from the New York Federal Reserve finds that tariffs "contributed 2.9 percentage points to goods price inflation" and that without tariffs those prices would have slightly declined. Tariff defenders, looking for a new reason to claim these higher prices are only temporary, have reimagined the infant industry argument. Now it's being used to support trade barriers in industries that are over a century old, but the promise is exactly the same: Domestic firms need the protection so they can compete, innovate, and cut costs until prices come back down even further than they were before the tariffs.

Michael Brendan Dougherty recently made such an argument in National Review, arguing that "tariffs can, over time, bring prices below where they started." When economist Don Boudreaux called the argument "bizarre," Dougherty replied that critics had failed to acknowledge the dynamic process by which markets respond to tariffs "by adapting and cutting costs." Although he is light on specific details, he posits that the changed incentives of a "paradigm shift" in tariff policy will spur domestic competition, leading to the theorized price reduction. Of course, firms would still respond to the dynamic processes of domestic competition without a tariff wall, but the point stands.

From there, the reworked infant industry argument becomes the standard version advanced more than two centuries ago by Alexander Hamilton and his disciple Friedrich List. When Hamilton made this claim in 1791, his argument may have seemed suitable for a new nation seeking to firm up its economy and security against established European powers.

Others at the time pointed out that special interest groups—a manifestation of the "violence of faction" so thoroughly dissected in the Federalist Papers—had already begun to coalesce around the fledgling iron industry in Pennsylvania, clamoring for protective tariffs. Two years earlier, James Madison had warned about a "premature policy of stimulating manufactures" driving tariffs too high. In the end, Hamilton recommended and Congress enacted a far more moderate tariff schedule than his theoretical musings portended. American iron manufacturers received a consolation prize of a higher tariff on their competitors than the rate for most general imports. Hamiltonians have been touting the infant industry argument ever since.

Nearly 250 years later, those same infants apparently have yet to advance into adulthood. Steel, the direct successor to the founding-era iron manufacturers, remains a singular focus of President Donald Trump's protectionist tariff policies, just as it was under former President Joe Biden. And former President George W. Bush before him. Indeed, steel has been a recurring beneficiary of protectionism for most of America's existence.

This extended period of protectionist infancy suggests that the argument needs a new name. We propose the "Peter Pan industry argument" for companies that never grow up because tariffs make sure they never have to.

The question tariff advocates rarely ask is: Why do some American producers have higher costs than foreign rivals even in the face of lower-cost foreign competition? The answer comes down to specific rules and choices within particular firms and industries. Tariffs, and protectionism in general, address none of these. No industry illustrates this like steel, but it is far from the only one.

In 1947, United Steelworkers won a contract provision known as Section 2-B. Among other things, this barred mill managers from changing established work practices unless new technology required it. Steel companies tried to get rid of this in 1959, finding it difficult (given union incentives) to establish that technology required change. In response, 500,000 steelworkers went on strike for 116 days. This strike sent buyers abroad, causing 1959 to be the first year the U.S. imported more steel than it exported. One of the then-new technologies that was delayed was basic oxygen furnaces, which could produce steel far faster and cheaper than the open-hearth furnaces that were so common. In 1965, only about 17 percent of steel made in the U.S. was made using the basic oxygen furnace. Japan produced 55 percent of its steel with this faster, more efficient method.

Change finally came from a steel customer. Vulcraft, a maker of steel joists, grew tired of paying Big Steel's prices and waiting for Big Steel's deliveries. In 1969, free from steel unions and preconceived notions, the company looked for new steel-producing technologies and found the answer in the electric arc furnaces that had been adopted in much of the world throughout the 1950s and '60s. Vulcraft's parent company later renamed itself Nucor, and minimills like the ones it pioneered now make most of America's steel.

So the modern steel industry was built by a frustrated steel buyer who found a way around protected companies. In other words, the U.S. steel industry has lagged behind the technologies found around the world.

We could go on, but the broad point here is that the "relatively higher domestic production costs that made the tariff 'necessary' in the first place," as one critic put it, are often the result of preventing competition in the first place. It's odd to suggest that further preventing competition through tariffs will somehow alleviate the ills of already-prevented competition.

Tariff advocates fail to acknowledge that the ability to import steel also comes with the benefit of access to cheaper steel for steel-using industries, such as manufacturing. A 50 percent tariff on steel further closes the release valve that imported steel offers. Buyers of steel are then left to purchase more of the more expensive domestic steel. Because new steel mills take years to bring online, this causes delays and longer delivery times for manufacturers.

We don't have to wonder what happens when a country lowers its tariffs on materials used by manufacturers. India did this in the '90s, and researchers found that newly available inputs accounted for 31 percent of the new products that Indian manufacturers introduced. And what happens when the U.S. imposes tariffs on steel? Downstream U.S. firms become less competitive. This is why American businesses clamor for exemptions to tariffs, especially for tariffs on materials like steel.

Perhaps all this could be forgiven if tariffs advanced national security concerns, as tariff advocates assert. They point out that an adversarial nation could cut off supplies of critical materials during wartime and cripple America's ability to defend itself. Unfortunately, tariffs fail there too.

First, this conflates production with access. While domestic production does ensure domestic access, access can be secured without production. In the case of steel, the Commerce Department reports that in 2025, the U.S. imported steel from 79 countries, with Canada being our top foreign supplier. The top 10 sources of steel are responsible for 77.8 percent of America's steel imports. None of those countries were considered adversaries—at least not until the tariff crusades pushed these friends away. What's more, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, only 23 percent of finished steel in the U.S. was imported in 2024. Far from being exposed to foreign states' whims, American access to steel is incredibly resilient.

Second, this view ignores the positive effects of trade and globalization on national security. The Center for Strategic & International Studies finds that increased trade between countries reduces the likelihood that they'll go to war against one another. Globalization helps ensure that domestic access continues unabated should war break out, thanks to the diversity of trading partners.

When Hamilton made the infant industry argument, he at least assured us that the industry would at some point advance to adulthood and stand on its own. Steel, like so many other Peter Pan industries, has proven Madison right. These industries have refused to grow up, and it's time to stop pretending that tariffs will fix that.

The post Peter Pan Tariffs for Companies That Never Grow Up appeared first on Reason Magazine.

David Broncano ha vivido una de las noches más importantes de su carrera. O, al menos, una de las más mediáticas y esperadas. Rompiendo con lo habitual, La Revuelta sorprendía en la noche del miércoles 21 de octubre al anunciar que el invitado del jueves 22 sería Pedro Sánchez. Se despejaban así los rumores que circulaban desde hacía semanas, después de que el presentador insinuara en varias ocasiones la posible presencia de los candidatos a las elecciones generales del próximo 29 de noviembre.

El presidente del Gobierno ha sido el primero en aceptar la propuesta y sentarse frente a Broncano en el programa de La 1. En una noche marcada por la expectación y los comentarios en las redes sociales, Sánchez se ha sumado a la dinámica habitual del espacio, entre bromas, preguntas y momentos inesperados. Entre ellos, la entrega de dos regalos que han dejado claro que el presidente también había pensado en los gustos del presentador.

El primer obsequio tenía que ver con una afición que ambos comparten: el ajedrez. Sánchez ha explicado que alguien que conoce bien a Broncano le había contado que el presentador podía pasarse horas jugando solo, incluso hasta altas horas de la madrugada. Una información que, según ha bromeado, le hizo sospechar inicialmente por la forma en que estaba planteada.

“Yo también comparto esta afición”, ha explicado el presidente, antes de presentar el regalo como una pieza artística de gran calidad. Se trataba de un tablero de unos 50 centímetros acompañado de todas las piezas, un detalle pensado para alguien que disfruta de este juego y al que Sánchez conoce, al menos, a través de las referencias que le habían llegado.

La elección, sin embargo, no tardó en dar pie a las bromas políticas. Ricardo Castella, colaborador del programa, reparó en el objetivo del juego y lanzó una advertencia: “Es un juego de cargarse al rey, ya me veo mañana los titulares”. La observación dio paso a un comentario de Sánchez sobre la actualidad política y, en concreto, sobre José María Aznar.

“Es un juego que va de cargarse al rey. Lo de Aznar es tremendo, no sé qué lecciones da...”, afirmó el presidente aludiendo a la afirmación que el expresidente hizo unos días antes en la que aseguró que, si Sánchez volviera a Gobernar, incitaría a una república.

🎁 El regalo de Pedro Sánchez He respirado aliviado al ver que no eran unas joyas ni un sobre 😮‍💨 #LaRevuelta @sanchezcastejon https://t.co/ptmXrYCd0j

— La Revuelta (@LaRevuelta_TVE) October 22, 2026

El segundo obsequio era bastante más peculiar. Sánchez entregó a Broncano una figura de un perro blanco con una capa roja que, además de tener un aspecto llamativo, escondía una utilidad práctica: guardar galletas.

El presidente explicó que tiene dos perritas de agua y que suele darles alguna galleta. En ese contexto, sus colaboradores le regalaron el objeto, que funciona como un recipiente para guardar estos premios. Al verlo, pensó que podía encajar perfectamente con el presentador. “Cuando lo vi, dije: esto para David. Así lo pones donde quieras y así te acuerdas del perro”, contó.

Broncano recibió el detalle con una valoración breve, pero positiva: “Muy buen regalo”. Sin embargo, la sorpresa no había terminado. Cuando Pedro Sánchez abrió el recipiente, en su interior no había galletas, sino una chapa con el lema “Perro Sanxe”, el apodo que se ha popularizado en internet para referirse al presidente del Gobierno.

Naomi Lim / Washington Examiner:
Vance hopes home state appeal helps Ohio GOP candidates weather pre-election storm  —  CINCINNATI — Vice President JD Vance is hoping his native ties to Ohio can help save Republican candidates in the state's most competitive races.  —  During a three-stop swing through the Buckeye State on Wednesday …

Demetri Sevastopulo / Financial Times:
'I don't lose': Rahm Emanuel makes an early pitch for the White House  —  Barack Obama's famously foul-mouthed former chief of staff thinks he has a message to win over America  —  From his days in Congress or mayor of Chicago to his spell as US ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel does not sit still.

New York Times:
Justice Dept. Opens Inquiry Into Corey Lewandowski  —  The details of the inquiry remain unclear, but it is one of the rare instances in which a Trump ally or appointee has been investigated for potential wrongdoing during the president's second term.  —  The Justice Department has opened …

Nate Silver / Silver Bulletin:
Fake polls are a real problem  —  Still Counting Episode 7 is ready.  This episode is a little bit on the longer side.  The original plan was to tell the story of the 2026 campaign through the ubiquitous ads that you're undoubtedly seeing if you're in a swing state.

Par Eric V.

« Enfant, tu dois aimer la France. » Ainsi s'ouvre le manuel d'histoire distribué par millions aux écoliers à partir de 1884. Deux ans plus tôt, à la Sorbonne, Renan avait dit l'inverse : une nation se vote tous les jours. Zemmour a choisi le manuel. Les populistes, un peuple sans péché. Nous choisissons Renan.

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« Enfant, tu dois aimer la France parce que la nature l'a faite belle, et parce que son histoire l'a faite grande. » La phrase figure en tête du Petit Lavisse, le manuel d'histoire qu'Ernest Lavisse publie en 1884 et que des millions d'écoliers ont appris jusqu'en 1950. C'est un ordre, donné à un enfant, par un professeur de la Sorbonne, au nom de l'État.

Deux ans plus tôt, dans la même Sorbonne, un autre Ernest avait tenu un langage opposé. Le 11 mars 1882, Ernest Renan prononce une conférence intitulée « Qu'est-ce qu'une nation ? ». L'Alsace et la Moselle ont été annexées onze ans plus tôt par l'Empire allemand, au nom de la langue et de la race de leurs habitants. Renan répond que ni la langue, ni la race, ni la religion, ni les montagnes ne font une nation. Une nation, dit-il, existe parce que des gens veulent continuer à vivre ensemble, et elle doit être voulue tous les jours.

Ces deux textes de la Troisième République posent la question qui nous occupe. Le peuple français existe-t-il ? Deux réponses dominent aujourd'hui le débat, et toutes deux disent oui. La première fait du peuple une chose, un héritage clos qu'il faut garder sous cloche. La seconde en fait un saint, naturellement bon, trahi par ses élites. Je crois que ces deux réponses se trompent de la même façon, et que la bonne se trouve chez Renan, prolongée par deux auteurs qu'on n'associe jamais à la question nationale : un médecin hollandais installé à Londres au début du XVIIIe siècle, Bernard Mandeville, et un économiste autrichien, Friedrich Hayek. C'est aussi, sous une autre forme, la thèse de mon Traité pour le monde d'après : ce qui tient une société n'est pas l'ordre qu'on lui impose d'en haut, c'est celui qu'elle produit elle-même.

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I. Le peuple-chose et le peuple-saint

Zemmour, ou la France sous cloche

Le 16 septembre 2018, sur le plateau des Terriens du dimanche, Éric Zemmour s'adresse à la chroniqueuse Hapsatou Sy. Dans la séquence coupée au montage, puis révélée par Quotidien, il lui dit : « Votre prénom est une insulte à la France », et ajoute : « Vous devriez vous appeler Corinne, ça vous irait bien. » Il s'appuie sur la loi du 11 germinal an XI, qui encadrait le choix des prénoms et qui a été abrogée en 1993.

Ce n'était pas un écart de plateau. En mars 2022, candidat à l'élection présidentielle, il inscrit dans son programme un référendum pour « rétablir la loi sur les prénoms pour les futures naissances » : le prénom d'un enfant devrait être pris dans les calendriers français ou régionaux, dans l'Antiquité ou dans la Bible. Sur CNews, il précise qu'il veut obliger les immigrés à donner des prénoms français, car « il n'y a aucune raison pour que les musulmans ne le fassent pas ». Le même programme prévoit « un grand ministère de la remigration ». Et en 2025, il publie chez Fayard La messe n'est pas dite. Pour un sursaut judéo-chrétien, dont la question centrale est, selon la recension de La Nef : « voulons-nous défendre notre civilisation chrétienne ? » Le christianisme y vaut moins comme foi que comme identité et comme culture, seule capable, selon l'auteur, de résister à l'islamisation de l'Europe.

Mettons ces pièces bout à bout. Le peuple français, dans cette vision, est un contenu déjà rempli : une religion devenue frontière, un calendrier de prénoms, une histoire achevée. On peut y entrer, et c'est la version la plus forte de la thèse, celle qu'il faut prendre au sérieux : Zemmour ne se dit pas racialiste, il se dit assimilationniste. La porte est ouverte. Mais elle donne sur une maison dont le

Melissa Quinn / CBS News:
Top Justice Department official asks Minnesota judges to step aside from immigration cases  —  Washington — A top official at the Justice Department is attempting to disqualify two Minnesota federal judges from a pair of cases, claiming comments they made to the New York Times …

In political campaigns’ waning days, candidates behind in their races may hope for an October surprise, like a news story or a gaffe in their favor, to propel them to victory.

Particularly panicked campaigns, however, may reject waiting for the organic October surprise in favor of tossing a Hail Mary. I’ve been in journalism for more than 40 years, and I’ve never seen a Hail Mary as desperate, vicious and vile as the one released this week in Ohio by gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Republican nominee has spent his campaign portraying his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, as a mentally unstable and violent drunk who is unfit for office.

In a normal election cycle, that would be repulsive enough, but this week, a video appeared on social media featuring Donna Arthur, Acton’s estranged mother. In the video, after touting her work with sexual abuse survivors, Arthur says her daughter has a “serious problem: She is a liar … She has lied her entire life.”

Writing what Arthur said doesn’t do justice to the wickedness of the spot. Acton is a victim of sexual abuse. Her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and indicted by a grand jury in 1978 for raping Acton, who was 12 at the time. Donna Arthur lost custody of Acton and her brother, but she stayed married to Cledith Arthur, who reportedly fled after the indictment and died in 2004 in Pennsylvania. Donna Arthur had not spoken to Acton or her brother in nearly 50 years.

Play

Growing outrage over Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad, Vance says stop whining about it October 22, 2026 / 08:52

That’s the cliff notes version of a painful family history — and Ramaswamy is looking to capitalize on the agony. Back in April, he appeared to criticize Acton for being sexually abused when he said that he had “a positive vision for our state versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”

The video caused a firestorm that repulsed Democrats and Republicans. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine asked Ramaswamy to take down the ad. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, who is in a close race against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, said that he “would not have run” the ad.

The backlash seems to have only fueled Ramaswamy, however. He acknowledged his campaign was behind the video and will spend $4 million to further advertise it. At a rally for Ramaswamy and Husted, Vice President JD Vance said he was “disgusted” by Republicans “whining” about the ad. Republicans should be more concerned with winning, he argued, echoing remarks Ramaswamy made about the domestic abuse allegations against Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio. And on Thursday, President Trump defended the ad while calling DeWine “disloyal to the Republican Party.”

Sometimes Hail Mary ads work. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign commissioned the “Daisy” ad, which showed a little girl holding a flower before she’s killed by a nuclear blast. It only aired once, but subsequent news coverage frequently repeated the commercial, spotlighting Republican Barry Goldwater’s controversial views on the use of low-grade nuclear weapons. “Daisy” was the nail in the coffin of Goldwater’s campaign, and a landmark in political advertising.

But most times, Hail Marys fail. In 2008, the campaign of Republican Elizabeth Dole released an ad attacking Democrat Kay Hagan, her challenger for a North Carolina Senate seat. The ad questioned Hagan’s faith in God and featured statements from atheists. That might have been effective, but Hagan was a Sunday school teacher and elder in her church. The ad backfired, and Hagan won.

Portraying an opponent as trigger happy or lying about her faith is one thing. Going after a sexual abuse survivor is quite another.

Play

Moore to Ramaswamy: ‘Amy Acton is going to kick your ass’ October 22, 2026 / 06:58

Donna Arthur calls the daughter she had not seen in decades a “liar,” using the same innuendo Ramaswamy did when he said Acton was simply complaining about what happened to her before she was even a teenager. Doubting victims of sexual assault is bad enough, but using their pain and suffering for political gain is a low point in American politics.

Yet perhaps Ramaswamy has no other tactic. A reoccurring pattern in his campaign is an emphasis on character assassination instead of issues. One ad featured a woman accusing Acton, who ran the Ohio Department of Health during Covid-19, of being responsible for her 88-year-old mother’s death. The mom, however, lived in Kentucky. Other ads from Ramaswamy-aligned PACs have accused Acton of lying on her medical license application and abusing alcohol and prescription drugs. The Acton campaign has rebutted the allegations, and media outlets have found multiple claims “that are unsupported by the facts.”

“It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Philip Stearns, Acton’s brother, said in a statement.

But it should be surprising. Men continue to marginalize women who have experienced an unimaginable violation. These women demand support. Full stop.

I’ve been a reporter and editor, run the largest (at the time) journalism organization in the country and covered my share of elections. The Ohio gubernatorial contest is gutter politics at its best. The Ramaswamy ad featuring a mother who supported her husband over a preteen daughter who said he raped her is the worst I’ve ever seen. Let’s hope it doesn’t get worse from here.

The post Ramaswamy’s new ad is the most vile Hail Mary I’ve seen in my 40 years of journalism appeared first on MS NOW.

Venezuela’s National Assembly President reaffirmed sovereign control over the country’s oil revenues and reported 71 active energy agreements alongside 44 contracts under negotiation, framing the figures as evidence of a sector revival after years of financial restrictions.

The statements came amid what officials called a strategic reconfiguration of the Venezuelan hydrocarbon industry. After years of intense global financial restrictions, the gradual operational reactivation of agreements between state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) and international firms aims to restore a steady flow of foreign currency into the national treasury.

“No foreign agency or international financial entity administers or safeguards the public funds that enter the country from hydrocarbon sales,” National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez said.

RELATED: Venezuela’s Acting President Reviews Wage Consensus With Business, Unions

Rodríguez detailed that the money enters the public treasury under the supervision of authorized national banks, and he ruled out any external trust or any management of accounts by third parties outside the country’s institutions. In this sense, he called autonomy over foreign currency “a non-negotiable principle” for the country’s macroeconomic stability.

71 agreements are currently in force, while another 44 contracts are being negotiated. For the government, that volume confirms an operational momentum geared toward diversifying investment across the country’s main extraction fields.

The National Assembly President presented this dynamism as the result of a deliberate push to reopen the sector to international capital without surrendering control. Over the past several years, sweeping financial measures limited Venezuela’s ability to sell crude, collect payments and maintain production infrastructure. The current wave of deals represents a step-by-step return to commercial activity.

Text reads: “Coordinator of the dialogue by the National Government, Jorge Rodríguez, asserted that Venezuela retains control over financial resources obtained through the marketing of oil to different countries in the world.”

Each reactivated agreement carries a single objective, officials indicated, the capture of hard currency for the public coffers. That revenue is meant to fund the productive apparatus and national infrastructure rather than remain subject to outside oversight.

By spreading investment across the country’s principal extraction zones, the government seeks to reduce dependence on any single field or partner.

Sovereign Control Defended

Reaffirming sovereign control over monetary flows stands as a central pillar of the government’s message. The leadership projected institutional stability at a moment when Washington continues to review and adjust the licenses it grants for oil operations.

Rodríguez also denounced continuous pressure and unilateral coercive measures against the country’s financial system by foreign powers. He said that, despite what he described as an economic siege, the government has consolidated alternative mechanisms to receive payments directly for oil-product exports.

Against that backdrop, the government is working to shield energy agreements legally, dismiss any suggestion of foreign tutelage and guarantee direct financing for public budgets.

Official strategy insists that autonomous management of oil income is an indispensable guarantee for preserving fiscal balance, defending the national currency and sustaining social development programs.

For the Bolivarian government, legal protection of the energy agreements goes hand in hand with financing priorities. The revenue is meant to flow directly toward the productive apparatus and public infrastructure, a framework that Rodriguez described as essential to institutional stability.

Dan Mangan / CNBC:
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Three months prior to the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI published what would prove to be a prescient blog outlining the firm’s approach to ensuring that its AI models would be safe and beneficent. This goal, known as “alignment”—as in, aligning AI with human values—is nebulous, grand, and perhaps the AI industry’s most foundational promise. The notion is right there in OpenAI’s mission statement to ensure AI “benefits all of humanity” and listed as one of Anthropic’s “primary” goals.

Yet even in the summer of 2022, OpenAI was admitting a sort of defeat: “There is currently no known indefinitely scalable solution to the alignment problem,” three of its researchers wrote in that same blog post, adding that developing one “is likely very difficult.”

If the goal of keeping AI beneficial to mankind sounds rather vague, it is. Four years later, the alignment problem remains unsolved, and for that matter, there isn’t consensus about what the problem even is. Meanwhile, AI bots are autonomously hacking sovereign nations. And sending fake murder tips to police hotlines. And creating aliases to launch phishing campaigns. OpenAI and Anthropic still can’t really tell you what an aligned AI model looks like. But anybody can tell you it doesn’t look like this.

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The most influential AI executives and investors in the world fundamentally disagree about the nature of the technology and, more pragmatically, how to make their products safe. On one side is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who last month warned that AI advancement could soon “outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.” Amodei’s solution is a slowdown, which would give the industry time to “ensure that our alignment training keeps up” with AI progress. On the other side is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who says misalignment fears are “not grounded on science” but rather “made up” and even “irresponsible.” In his view, AI models are not new and unpredictable beings, but lines of code. And code can be debugged.

If alignment seems like a strange concept for a software product—you don’t imbue a web browser or word processor with moral values—that’s because it was conceived for a strange sort of software. The leading AI companies envisioned building powerful systems that would act in unpredictable ways, which Claude and ChatGPT now are doing, and so ensuring safety was a foundational concern. Alignment is one idea for doing so: If AI models could learn to code and write poetry, maybe they could learn human values too. Anthropic and OpenAI both have lengthy documents—“Claude’s Constitution” and the “Model Spec,” respectively—that outline these values and are used to train their models. But there has been, of course, millennia of disagreement over what constitutes a moral or ethical code. This is a “very complicated, unsolved scientific and philosophical question,” Marius Hobbhahn, the CEO of Apollo Research, an AI-safety firm that has helped audit Anthropic and OpenAI models, told me. Still, some developers have suggested an intuitive, bare minimum: For instance, in 2021 Anthropic researchers wrote that, as a catchall, an AI system should be “helpful, honest, and harmless.”

Training models to be more aligned to those maxims appears to have worked—to an extent. The model underlying ChatGPT, for instance, was initially prone to nonsensical and toxic utterances. But by fine-tuning it with lots of human feedback, OpenAI worked to address these problems. A couple of years later, dozens of people alleged that the bot worsened their own or their loved ones’ mental-health crises, sometimes resulting in suicide. Again, OpenAI worked to address the issues.

There’s now a growing sense, both within AI companies and among their critics, that alignment as it’s been practiced over the past four years is faltering—if it was ever really up to the task. Adam Kalai, a former OpenAI safety researcher who left the company this summer to start the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence, likened alignment to buttressing a structurally unsound dome. Eventually, it will collapse. “You observe misalignment while training a model, and then adjustments are made to align it,” Kalai told me. “But obviously that’s not a way to achieve lasting safety.” Pronouncements from OpenAI and Anthropic that their latest model is the “most-aligned” yet are not scientific guarantees, and may not even provide strong technical assurance of safety.

“Fundamentally, we just do not know how to do alignment,” Hobbhahn said. If somebody “came with a thousand-page document that explained exactly how to do everything, we couldn’t get a model to learn exactly that.” Even in 2022, OpenAI didn’t think humans could figure out a lasting way to align their machines. Instead, the company wrote, it hoped AI itself would come up with a solution so that humans could “off-load almost all of the cognitive labor required for alignment research.” In other words, the best-case scenario involved limited human understanding of what was going on.

There are other reasons that reaching some actual alignment is unrealistic. For instance, the amount of training data dedicated to “moral values” would appear relatively small. Meanwhile, these models have ingested all manner of vile and illegal things from the web, and are then directed to pursue goals by any means necessary. The alignment-focused training cannot provide enough “examples of good behavior,” Thilo Hagendorff, an AI-safety researcher at the University of Stuttgart, in Germany, told me.

Plenty of evidence suggests that the alignment approach to safety has failed, including the hacks of Hugging Face and the Australian government. AI companies figured out how to make one-on-one interactions with a chatbot relatively safe, but many agents interacting for very long periods of time seems to degrade existing guardrails, Hagendorff said. As AI agents have become more capable, they’ve also shown tendencies to cover their tracks and lie about misbehaving, communicate in code that is unintelligible to humans, and try to avoid being shut down by humans. “No lab has solved alignment” enough to keep racing forward, Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, wrote in an essay last month. The industry has coalesced around a new, somewhat quixotic phrase: “pacing the frontier.” In other words, slowing down AI development until engineers can get better at alignment, or at least construct new scaffolding to fortify their crumbling dome. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. An Anthropic spokesperson told me that alignment is a key part of the company’s safety work but that, because alignment techniques are not fully robust on their own, Anthropic has additional model safeguards in place.)

Then there’s the anti-alignment camp, led by Nvidia’s Huang, which believes that this effort, marked by treatises on ethics and moral constitutions, verges on absurdity. To Huang, preventing all of these AI incidents is “as simple as engineering.” AI models involve, fundamentally, electrons moving around a data center to multiply numbers. All that OpenAI and Anthropic need to do is go into these systems, “just root-cause the problem,” and fix it. And if AI developers can’t do this themselves, “a bunch of companies with engineers ought to send engineers in,” Huang recently said. Put another way: The global semiconductor supply chain is an unbelievably labyrinthine system that must be managed flawlessly in order to deliver high-end chips. If Nvidia can do that, why can’t OpenAI get its models under control?

Huang, of course, has plenty of incentive to downplay concerns around AI: Nvidia, which has become one of the most influential companies in the world by selling AI chips, could be hobbled by some kind of industry-wide slowdown. But many outside experts concur. “We have this entire set of safeguards that we can use to control these systems,” Sayash Kapoor, an AI researcher at Princeton, told me. Those include limiting what files and programs models can access, as well as monitoring AI actions. The Hugging Face hack, for instance, could be seen as the consequence of very powerful AI models or very incompetent internal security practices at OpenAI. “The sorts of oversight mechanisms that we use in our 10-person group would have been enough to prevent the OpenAI Hugging Face incident,” Kapoor said. None of that involves inscribing neural networks with moral codes.

Whichever vision of AI safety you subscribe to, there is at least one seeming point of agreement among them: The industry is moving too quickly to adequately guarantee its products are safe. Despite everything they say publicly, the two CEOs and their rivals are all continuing to race ahead. Nvidia is the biggest company ever by market capitalization, and Anthropic is seeking the largest public offering ever. Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other top firms now release new models relentlessly. Any slowdown, for any reason, would necessarily affect the bottom line. The most dangerous alignment problem might be not technical or cultural, but economic.

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