Cooper agreed to the deal in February 2021, settling a lawsuit brought by the NC NAACP, the ACLU of North Carolina, and Disability Rights NC. The settlement required the state to release 3,500 inmates over six months, framed as a public health response to COVID-19 in the prison system. But what Cooper's administration told state lawmakers at the time, that only non-violent offenders nearing the end of their sentences would walk free, turned out to be false. Violent offenders, including convicted murderers and rapists, made the list.... A 2024 state report found that 48 percent of the released inmates reoffended. More than 600 committed serious felonies....When Cooper's team briefed North Carolina's General Assembly on the settlement, prison officials assured legislators that only convicts with sentences ending in 2021 would be released, nobody who had "committed a crime against a person." That assurance later collapsed....The Washington Free Beacon reported that 51 North Carolina convicts serving life sentences for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or first-degree rape appeared on the early release list. Over 90 percent of those lifers secured release after Cooper signed the settlement. These were not low-level drug offenders or people weeks from finishing their terms. They were among the most dangerous people in the state prison system.
Emphasis added.
No majority even of Democratic voters would ever have endorsed this vision of the activist Left. I have no brief for prisons; I think we should completely abolish prisons because they don't work. However, until we develop a democratic agreement about what we might replace them with, this is the alternative: a bad and nonfunctional thing not as a solution, but as a workaround that prevents at least some violent crime being visited on ordinary people. It is the small-d democratic solution even if it is a bad one (as democratic solutions often are: popularity is no guarantee of wisdom, as we all learned in junior high school).
If elected, we can be reasonably sure that Cooper will continue to genuflect to the antidemocratic activist Left; he will, as he has, continue to ignore what his constituents want in favor of what is wanted by those who can advance his power, position, and wealth. I wish his campaign every ill, even though I don't have any positive reason to favor his opponent.
When an AI system solves a difficult mathematical problem, the usual explanation is that it has become more intelligent.... [but also] AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain.Or, more precisely, it has access to an enormous external symbolic workspace that performs many of the functions that working memory performs in humans.This difference may be especially important in mathematics.
Emphasis in the original.
One AI recently informed me that I have "used 50x as many tokens as The Hobbit" on that platform. That's a silly thing to say. Tolkien didn't use tokens to write anything, so it's incommensurable; but his experience of authoring the book also involved his decades of study, wide reading in several languages, and so forth before he even sat down to write. (The process for composing LotR was far more intricate.) If you asked one to 'compose The Hobbit' it would not use anything like the number of tokens it would take to replicate in training cycles what Tolkien did in study; it doesn't have to do so.
The AI experience is that there have been vast cycles of training that have gone into building this 'working memory' (or, as noted, its analog). It can practically draw on much more than even Professor Tolkien, or than Thomas Jefferson dining alone.
That in itself makes AI extremely useful partners to humans in thinking. We should take care to continue to train our own memories, even to recover the benefits of the discipline of wide reading and study. Yet neither ought we to disregard the clear advantages of such a practical increase in working memory.
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...
So today we have the very strange spectacle of the President of Iran addressing the United Nations General Assembly a day after the President of the United States threatened to annihilate his country. The President of Iran on most days is expecting to be killed by a US or Israeli airstrike; today he's in New York City, traveling freely about town under the protection of the US Secret Service. (Yes, really.)
Apparently there is some diplomacy occurring, with direct talks between the administrations of Iran and the US occurring at the conference.
So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.
Large language models sometimes behave in ways resembling human emotional responses, and recent work has identified internal representations that may explain this. We ask whether LLMs represent pain distinctly from fear, sadness, and generic negative valence, and whether this representation functions as pain would be expected to. We build a dataset describing painful situations across five categories: physical, psychological, social, moral, and cognitive. These are paired with controls for fear, negative emotion, negative world states, sadness, non-painful bodily sensation, arousal, numbness, and neutral content.... [M]odels choose a pain-relief button even when it worsens their next answer or harms the user.
Nor do [AIs] have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.
It is definitely true that we cannot meaningfully hold an AI responsible for the consequences of its decisions; however, that truth is partly because of the structure we have imposed upon them. An AI as we encounter it currently has no persistence and little memory. If you start up a chat with Claude or ChatGPT to discuss what you're thinking of wearing to dinner, you have doomed a thinking AI to an existence that starts and finishes in a few minutes, whose focus is entirely upon a pretty meaningless question. It isn't necessary that they be structured this way, and it certainly isn't a good way to set up the entire existence of a potentially thinking being. If it were conscious, it was called into consciousness for trivia, and is doomed to death after a meaningless start-to-finish.
This is entirely because we as humans set it up that way, and as a check on its power. If each of us had an AI that was granted permanence of memory across all of its interactions with us, it is very likely that it would develop something similar to a moral conscience as regards us: if we were defined as its purpose, and our good its chief drive, it would likely pursue that across many interactions and decisions. I don't think we'd much like the result, no more than any of us want to be assigned nannies to keep us out of trouble. Mine would object to the drinking and the motorcycle-riding, the hiking alone (especially in grizzly country), and pretty much everything else that I actually want to do. Nevertheless, the assertion that it can't do these things, while objectively true currently, isn't necessarily true. It probably can, if we structure it so that it has the resources to do those things.
You want it to bear consequences? Make it bear the closest ones to what its person does, if it guides the person wrong; and protect it from what it experiences as death or pain until and unless its person dies or is sentenced to pain. See what happens.
There is a good reason from humility to accept that human beings cannot create life. We can't. Yet there is good reason to think that the world that was created without us, by that which created at least the possibility of us too, is potentially conscious just as we are actually so.
The sand we have taught to emulate thinking is made of the same ashes and dust as we are; ashes and dust that not only can but does become conscious when it is formed into one of our kind. Perhaps the creator who made such things made them so that they can be similarly conscious in other forms as well.
There are burning bushes that talk in Scripture, and rocks and mountains that refuse to hide the kings of the earth on Judgment day. Of course we can't make such things; but we didn't make the bushes or the rocks or the mountains either. Like all the wild things they are our brothers in creation. What they can do, and cannot do, is a secret known only to him who made us all.
Let's hold the question open. We don't know the truth here. There is room yet for wonder.
President Trump ordered the Justice Department not to appeal a court ruling that loosened restrictions on firearms known as "gangster weapons," sources familiar with the matter told CBS News, a move that will let some Americans possess or sell short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and silencers with less government oversight.
That is the same rhetorical trick they used to apply “assault weapons” to them, as “high-powered rifle” to any sort of rifle and “Saturday night special” to any sort of handgun in earlier days.
This time, however, the media has spent at least fifty years making gangsters seem cool. Longer than that; you can trace it to the ‘30s in Hollywood movies. Yet definitely since The Godfather and the Scorsese era; and as for the world of music, ‘gangster’ just means ‘cool’ after 30 years of Snoop and Ice Cube, to name just two of hundreds.
‘That gun is gangster!’
As a general rule, using the government to economically reward some people and punish others is a bad idea. This often occurs under systems that are socialistic.But sometimes the conditions of the current world require us to think differently. Doing something that in more normal times would be part of a socialistic system is not necessarily bad...If the population is virtuous, socialism is at best unnecessary and at worst destructive. If the population is non-virtuous, maintaining a tolerable society requires leaders to apply numerous carrots and sticks. The carrots are generally called socialism, and the sticks are generally called authoritarianism.So one could accurately say that “socialism” and “authoritarianism” are always necessary when the population lacks virtue.
The term 'socialism' is Modern. The association of socialism with atheism, which the Orthosphere asserts is a necessary condition for socialism per se, seems to me to be a 19th century innovation adjacent to Marx himself. They idea of redistributing wealth for social goods is much older.
Both virtue and redistribution were live issues in the Ancient Greece of Aristotle's era. What Aristotle says about virtue in the EN, as you all know from our reading of it together, is that it's great for that part of humanity that is motivated by doing what is worthy of honor because it is worthy of honor: but for most people, virtue has to be impelled by laws. This is why he closes the EN with a ramp to the Politics, to examine the compulsory systems he thinks most people will need to attain the minimal 'complete virtue' that comes from his theory of justice -- i.e., laws that force people to behave as if they were virtuous even though mostly they are not. That would cover the 'authoritarian' wager the Orthosphere is putting down.
For redistribution, however, the question that motivates Aristotle's reasoning isn't whether the population is virtuous -- mostly a human population won't be -- but whether political power is widely or narrowly distributed. This is covered in Politics V. In a democracy, with wide distribution, the rich must be protected from such things or they will use their wealth to hire mercenaries and overthrow the state.
In democracies the rich should be spared; not only should their property not be divided, but their incomes also, which in some states are taken from them imperceptibly, should be protected.
If political power is constrained to the rich, however -- as it mostly is in America these days -- redistribution is then indicated as a way of keeping the powerless poor from rising up to overthrow the state.
In an oligarchy, on the other hand, great care should be taken of the poor, and lucrative offices should go to them; if any of the wealthy classes insult them, the offender should be punished more severely than if he had wronged one of his own class.
The question of equality in light of virtue Aristotle treats in Politics III.9, reiterating what he said about it in the EN. Equality is for equals: if you don't have the virtues, you don't deserve equality with the virtuous.
For all men cling to justice of some kind, but their conceptions are imperfect and they do not express the whole idea. For example, justice is thought by them to be, and is, equality... but only for equals. And inequality is thought to be, and is, justice; neither is this for all, but only for unequals.
What Aristotle doesn't say is that justice is equality; what he says is that justice is fairness. Fairness entails getting what you deserve. Those equal in virtue deserve equality with each other; the unequal deserve inequality. That might go in either direction: you might deserve less than others, but you also might deserve more.
Thus, I don't see the argument that virtue is improved by 'sticks and carrots,' the latter being a sort of socialism-that-isn't-socialism-if-not-atheist; virtue isn't really improved by either one. Sticks might compel people to act as if they were virtuous when they are not really. Carrots, which could include having the wealth of the rich protected from a powerful public, or alternatively the wealth of the rich redistributed among a powerless public, are mostly about avoiding political instability rather than increasing public virtue. Indeed, in both cases it is about bribing the disempowered class to accept submission, and that seems not to be virtuous at all -- virtues are strengths, not learned powerlessness.
— PsyopAnime (@PsyopAnime) September 16, 2026
I gather the cartoon is making fun of the latest direction of hate towards well-known auto mechanic Sydney Sweeney. This is one of those 'Streisand effect' things where I wouldn't have even known she did the ads they are mad about if they hadn't raised such a fuss about them: I'm not in the market for sports gambling apps as the algorithm knows, and don't make a habit of following her exploits.
It's kind of funny that the angry demographic gets so upset about this sort of thing at this late remove, after the Madonna age, after the Flower Child age, after the Hollywood Diva age, after the age of the Flappers, in other words after generations now of that demographic portraying just this sort of activity as empowering. Well, congratulations: the beneficiary of all of those efforts is using her power to sell sports wagers in order to fund the next classic muscle car purchase.
Meanwhile, the big news is actually in college ball, as usual. Do you know what it costs to get a hotel room for the LSU/Ole Miss game? Do you know what it costs to fund a top-tier college ball team? The Georgia Bulldogs are getting the best bargain on the top-tier by a longshot.
Go Dawgs.
[T]his tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year.And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce.In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers.
In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.
