September 11th Anniversary

Today, Director John Ratcliffe declassified 71 President's Daily Brief (PDB) products in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and consistent with President Donald Trump's historic transparency initiative.

This collection represents the Agency's single largest release of declassified CIA PDB products related to 9/11, providing unprecedented transparency on America's most sensitive intelligence publication from the years before and the day after one of the darkest moments in our history.  The products trace the story of CIA analysts' evolving understanding of al-Qa'ida and efforts to highlight and warn of Usama Bin Ladin's attack plotting despite sparse, vague, and imperfect information.

-- Statement by the Central Intelligence Agency, "CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of 9/11" with links to "71 Declassified 9/11 related President's Daily Brief products" available for download as PDFs (11 September 2026)

I Wonder

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

-- John Steinbeck (1902-1968), American author, 1962 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962) Pt. 3

Motivational Non-Alignment

I resigned from Anthropic today.  I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic.  Neither company is acting responsibly.  They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. 

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.  This is not a marketing stunt.  If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible -- but I hear the same people express fear privately.  No other human activity poses this level of danger.

If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like.  Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind?  Should you put your head down because "it’s happening anyway" -- or take this moment to call for different conditions?

-- Jacob Coxon, posting as @hilbertspaess about the perceived dangers of Recursive Self Improvement in AI models, by AI models (8 September 2026)

Space: The Final Frontier

Space: the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

-- Canadian actor William Shatner (1931-), in the voice-over introduction to the television series Star Trek in its debut episode, 8 September 1966.  I previously blogged this same quote 10 years ago today, for the 50th anniversary

Vast Reserve Army

When times are bad, however, in moments of crisis, when profits are low, or when there is little or no demand corporations and companies can protect themselves and their market value by simply letting workers go.  Workers, on the other hand usually must continue to pay for food, rent, healthcare, and basic utilities in order to survive.  As a consequence, while capital can often weather the storm of such economic crises, they can severely weaken the power of the working class by creating what Marx called a vast reserve army of labor.  And since unemployment insurance compensations are rarely available to all and always only for a short period of time, workers -- whether laid off or only threatened with the prospect of layoffs -- will eventually be pressured to work much harder for less wages. 

-- James Dennis Hoff, American author, educator, and activist, on the 2020 stock market crash, "Freeze Layoffs: Make the Capitalists Pay" (23 March 2020), Left Voice 

Value Of A Sentiment

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

-- John Galsworthy OM (1867 - 1933), English novelist and playwright, 1932 Nobel laureate in literature, Windows, Act II (1922)

RIP Gloria Steinem

Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least.

-- Gloria Marie Steinem (25 March 1934 - 2 September 2026), American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist, My Life on The Road (2015) p.124