Free Republic

Today, EA is the unseen force driving AI safety discourse. Its ideas and money course through institutions seeking to build and govern AI and, with it, America’s future. And Americans deserve to know about it, because the EA crowd is trying to restrict your access to the most important technology of the 21st century..... Effective altruism is a utilitarian philosophy that claims to use evidence and reason to do good, ranking competing needs through a common calculus. It leads in strange directions. For example, in a truly universal moral frame, effective altruists argue, why should a single country like the...

Three of the world's top artificial intelligence companies' CEOs announced Saturday that they believe the industry needs to slow down.On Saturday, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI publicly backed a call to reduce the pace at which AI companies build more powerful models. This announcement comes just days after Anthropic revealed that its chatbot, Claude, was being used to attempt to create bioweapons, spy on Ukraine and scam dating app users.On Saturday, Amodei posted an article titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities...

When it was reported last month that Anthropic’s Claude had resorted to blackmail and other self-preservation techniques to avoid being shut down, alarm bells went off in the AI community.Anthropic researchers say that making the models misbehave (“misalignment” in industry parlance) is part of making them safer. Still, the Claude episodes raise the question: Is there any way to turn off AI once it surpasses the threshold of being more intelligent than humans, or so-called superintelligence?AI, with its sprawling data centers and ability to craft complex conversations, is already beyond the point of a physical failsafe or “kill switch” —...

Like most Americans, watching coverage of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 brought out a lot of emotions in me. It also brought out curiosity, and one of the things I was curious about was how the Church responded to the 25th anniversary of this barbaric event. On 9/11/2001 when Pope John Paul II was informed of the 9/11 terrorist attack he withdrew to his private chapel and prayed, for long periods. He was also one of the first world leaders to send a message to GW Bush, describing the attacks as "inhuman" and "unspeakable horror". The next day, during a...

9/11 Exposed The Weakness Of A Post-Christian WestWe didn’t just get the Muslim world wrong. We got America wrong too.A quarter-century removed from the terrorist attacks of 9/11, several things are now obvious that were not at all obvious to American elites in 2001 (although they should have been). Perhaps the most obvious, as I wrote earlier this week, is that the attacks inaugurated a religious war that we have lost, or at least are in the process of losing. The West failed to recognize the religious nature of the conflict because it was committed to a secular liberal account...

What Are We Teaching Children About 9/11?Twenty-five years later, some instructional materials criticize America’s response to terrorism instead of informing students about the ideology and perpetrators of the attacks.September 11, 2026, marks 25 years since al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people in the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.A generation of students has grown up with no memory of that day. What they understand about it depends on what we choose to teach them. Judging by some of the materials available, Americans should be concerned.One of the nation’s most elite schools of education—the University...

The Heavy Yoke of 9/11 Twenty-five years after September 11, we’ve failed to confront the ideology that drove the terrorists.Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people were murdered in the space of 102 minutes. Most of them had gone to work. Some had boarded an airplane. Among them were 343 New York City firemen who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center towers while everyone else came down, knowing what that act meant. Aboard a plane over Pennsylvania, 40 passengers and crew learned by telephone what was happening and took their plane back from the men who had...

America’s Youth Still Need Charlie KirkHis greatest legacy is showing how faith, courage, and action can improve the nation.One year ago today, America lost Charlie Kirk.In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. At other times, it feels like a lifetime ago. Twelve months after that horrifying day, we have only begun to reckon with the scale of the loss for conservatism—and for America.To someone who ignores politics, it can be hard to explain just why Charlie’s loss was so great. He had a popular podcast—but there are many of those. He did campus debates—but he didn’t have a monopoly...

9/11 Was The Beginning Of A Religious War That We LostWe thought religion had no real influence on peoples and cultures, so we failed to recognize the religious nature of the conflict.Twenty-five years ago this week I listened to the late historian Stephen Ambrose deliver the opening remarks for a conference about World War Two at Hillsdale College. He had good news for us. The 21st century, Ambrose declared, would be an era of peace and progress. He said the major conflicts of the 20th century, the two world wars and the Cold War that followed, were fundamentally disputes within...

🚨 WOW. Shocking poll from Gallup reports that since 2001, Democrats went from 85% proud to be an American to 36% — a plummet of 49 POINTS Republicans went from 90% proud to be an American — to 92% PERCENT, actually gaining 2 points

For years, one of the most visible consequences of transgender policies has played out in women's sports. Female athletes have watched biological males enter their competitions, stand on podiums, occupy roster spots and, in some cases, enter spaces once reserved exclusively for women. Whatever one's position on transgender issues, the conflict has forced society to confront an uncomfortable question: What happens when the interests of people who identify as transgender collide with protections created specifically for women? But there is another group of women caught in that collision who receive considerably less public attention. They are women in prison. And...

In the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 jihad attacks, and on the day itself, the establishment media is going to inundate us with feature stories about “Islamophobia.” Here’s one: NPR on Tuesday ran an interview with Rozina Ali, who writes for the New York Times and has just published a new book of victimhood propaganda, Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America. Hawking the book and Ali’s appearance, NPR tells us: After the Sept. 11 attacks, assaults against Muslims in the U.S. surged. At the same time the U.S. government launched a...

Four House Democrats proposed an amendment Aug. 31 that would formally condemn socialism in all its forms and specifically denounce the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), while removing election-security provisions from a Republican resolution heading to the House floor.The amendment — offered by Democratic Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Hillary Scholten of Michigan, Jared Moskowitz of Florida, and Tom Suozzi of New York — targets H. Res. 1490, introduced Aug. 27 by Rep. Jeff Crank, R-Colo. Crank’s resolution condemns socialism and the DSA while also calling for enactment of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, known as the SAVE America...

Hasan Piker, two weeks ago, delivered this message: "Democrats, listen to me, I know we don't always see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, but you have to literally, at some point – I know you don't want to do this – defend me. Not because you love what I have to say, not because I'm part of this coalition, even though I am, whether you like it or not … I'm not this dangerous, toxic radical force." Was that a warning or a threat? Some 10 days later, what did this non-"dangerous, toxic radical force" say? "Because...

Posted to stimulate a discussion of the comment "Demographics defines culture, AND labor practices define demographics". This comment was made by a South African farmer who is trying to maintain his farm and stay alive. This is a vanity somewhat, but this was the first time I heard the above quote, and I think it is highly relevant to what too many of our industry / corporate leaders have done by bringing in H1B workers and off shoring jobs. I think that labor practices truly do have a defining effect on demographics, and demographics can have a profound if not...

What would Karl Marx think of his latter-day disciples in the Democratic Socialists of America? No doubt he would find their politics largely agreeable, but they would present him with a class conundrum. DSA is not a movement of workers but of people with intellectual credentials: some 80 percent of its members have college degrees and 35 percent have advanced degrees. Those credentials are all granted by the institutions that capitalists sustain – it’s not bricklayers who endow Harvard University. State colleges and universities depend on government funding, but government itself, under capitalism, is simply an instrument of business interests....

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth exposed me to a culture very different from the one that nurtured me. Growing up as a grammar schoolboy in 1970s and ’80s England, I absorbed the importance of personal restraint; emotional self-control in public; privacy; acting with honesty and fairness, even to one’s own hurt; and respecting others regardless of their social status or opinions. At the level of society, such personal values...

The Michigan Democratic Senate nominee compared circumcision to “gender transition” surgery for minors and stood by his call to abolish ICE during a wide-ranging appearance on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime.” Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed clashed with Fox News host Jesse Watters in an Aug. 24 interview over a slew of topics, including “gender transition” medical interventions for minors, immigration enforcement, Sharia law, taxes on the wealthy, and the Iran war. El-Sayed, a progressive who defeated the establishment favorite in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary Aug. 4, is facing Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in November in one of...

The ad begins with a poor Russian peon, bundled up for the harsh winter, cautiously asking a stern sentry about what he is guarding. “Is toilet paper.” “Is good?” “Is cheap,” replies the soldier. The word spreads down the ranks of the people standing in line at the store. “Cheap toilet paper!” they say in astonished turn. One gets his hands on some: it bends and folds, as if it’s not toilet “paper” at all but lengths of semi-raw wood pulp. For some reason that television commercial from the mid-’80s has come to mind quite a lot lately. It was...

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has warned that the phenomenon of illegal weapons in Israel goes far beyond the criminal sphere and poses a security threat. Speaking at a lecture on Thursday night, Bennett said that more than half a million illegal weapons are held by civilians, describing the situation as "a security threat of the highest order." Bennett claimed that illegal weapons are being transferred to terrorists in Judea and Samaria and to organized crime families in Israel. "This is an extremely dangerous ticking time bomb," he stressed. According to Bennett, "A security threat should and may be dealt...