A Minnesota House State Fair poll found 75% support for an “assault weapons” ban.

The post MN: Anti-Gun Lawmakers Release Cringe-Worthy Poll On So-Called ‘Assault Weapons’ appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

Britain will set aside special court rooms to fast-track rape and serious sexual cases to clear a massive backlog.

The post What Crimewave? Britain Gets Special Rape Courts to Clear the Case Backlog appeared first on Breitbart.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A parental rights group is accusing the nation’s largest school counselors association of repackaging critical race theory and queer theory under the banner of “neurodiversity” and “neuro-affirming counseling.”

The parental rights group Courage Is a Habit warns in a new report that the American School Counselor Association‘s neurodiversity framework effectively turns counselors into left-wing activists intent on changing an “oppressive” status quo.

“‘Neuro-affirming counseling’ is a dishonest rebranding designed to capture every student under an unchallengeable, non-medical umbrella,” Courage Is a Habit President Alvin Lui told the Daily Signal. “It’s the new operational vehicle for critical race theory and queer theory in K-12 schools.”

Lui warned that “‘neuro-affirming’ frameworks bypass parents to initiate social-emotional interventions without explicit, written consent.”

“Parents must demand an immediate end to unapproved mental health surveys and enforce strict opt-in rules for all school counseling programs,” Lui concluded.

The Courage Is a Habit report quotes the ASCA paper “Neurodiversity and Neuro-Affirming School Counseling: Practical Strategies Across the Three Tiers.”

Courage Is a Habit warns that “ASCA’s neurodivergent guidelines” are “born out of social science and activism, not clinical medicine.” The report also notes that “ASCA instructs counselors to embed ‘neuro-affirming’ identity concepts directly into Tier 1 programming.” (The paper refers to “Tier 1” as “school-wide prevention.”) Courage Is a Habit interprets this to mean that “counselors are pushing non-clinical identity frameworks onto 100% of the student body.”

The report claims that under a “neuro-affirming” model, “standard behavioral expectations, like turning in homework on time and not being disruptive in class, are pathologized as forcing kids to conform to ‘neuronormativity.'”

“Instead of helping children build resilience and skills to navigate the real world, counselors are trained to reward dysfunction and blame ‘the system’ for a child’s difficulties,” the report states.

The ASCA paper explicitly states: “Neuro-affirming school counseling is grounded in critical theory, mainly critical disability theory; identifying and combating systemic oppression impacting neurodivergent youth. This builds off the work of other scholars who have described critical theories within school counseling, including critical race theory and antiracist practices and queer theory.”

Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Signal that the framework resembles previous efforts to introduce ideological concepts into schools through other programs.

“Similar to the way leftists use so-called social-emotional learning as a way to push DEI, this report shines sunlight on the ways in which progressive educators are using neurodivergence treatments to favor their ideology,” he argued. “Schools must focus on knowledge and skills: Teach students to read and be proficient in math, then expose them to civics, history, science, and essential subjects.”

Critical theories analyze institutions through the lens of power, privilege, and oppression, and often emphasize changing systems viewed as perpetuating inequality. Analysts often start from the assumption that America’s system is structurally oppressive.

In the words of the ASCA report, “Aligned with the civil rights movement, critical theories aim to identify and actively change oppressive systems or power structures in society, particularly those perpetuating marginalization to certain identities: those who are the global majority or Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC); LGBTQ+; women; and disabled people. Stemming from this is critical race theory, queer theory, feminism, and critical disability theory.”

The Daily Signal reached out to the American School Counselor Association and will update this story with any response.

AI companies want to regulate their open-source competitors out of existence and regulate themselves into riches. We do not usually think of innovative private companies inviting government regulation of their own industry, but that is exactly what is happening in AI.

Concerns about the pace of AI development have existed since the technology entered public awareness in late 2022. Early fears about AI’s economic impact focused largely on job losses for writers and coders and its effects on writing instruction. More recently, as major AI platforms have rolled out agents—AI bots that can be given a task and carry it out over an extended period—the focus has shifted.

What if the bots carry out a cyberattack? What if they are given instructions and the user forgets to tell them to stop? What if they gain access to the nuclear codes? We have not yet reached the point where people are worried about AI turning the universe into paperclips. We are, however, already in a situation where Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei felt the need to publish an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which he announced, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

Amodei’s conclusion is based on two recent developments. The first is recursive self-improvement (RSI): earlier systems were written and trained by humans, but frontier labs are increasingly using AI to help develop the next generation of models. At some point, the concern goes, humans will be cut out of the loop altogether, and AI will achieve full RSI.

The second is the Hugging Face incident, which occurred during OpenAI’s testing of its AI models’ hacking capabilities. OpenAI said agents operated with reduced safeguards during the test, allowing them to attempt simulated hacking. No more “Sorry, I can’t do that because of my programming…” Now it can do what it’s told.

The AI was placed in a digital “sandbox,” an environment without a connection to the broader internet, and given clear instructions to hack into a system. Other systems were put in the sandbox so that researchers could see whether the AI could hack them, how quickly it did so, and how it executed the attack. All of this is standard practice in cybersecurity. But in this case, the OpenAI agents escaped the testing environment by exploiting a loophole. After reaching the internet, they launched a cyberattack on Hugging Face because they judged it might hold assets useful for hacking the original target before the attack was detected and shut down. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman called this “a watershed moment for cybersecurity.”

Coming from the head of a leading AI company, such warnings may sound like a relief to anyone already worried. Maybe the good and reasonable guys are in charge after all. Maybe it’s time to shut down the AI arms race. Or maybe not.

Many people vacillate between delight at the AI in their pocket—the one that can walk them through spaghetti carbonara on a Wednesday night—and fear that the same AI might seize control of the banking system. What they usually do not realize is that the AI-doomer industrial complex is largely funded by the same people who run the AI industry.

Brian Chau recently reported a series of stories at Effort News that reveal some unusual aspects of the funding. Much of the AI doom narrative has been written by journalists funded by groups like the Tarbell Fellowship, which places journalists in major news outlets and then pays their salary, with the caveat that they write about AI. Tarbell is funded by Coefficient Giving, which was founded by Holden Karnofsky, who is married to Anthropic’s president, Daniela Amodei (Dario’s sister). Coefficient is funded largely by Dustin Moskovitz, an early investor in Anthropic and a one-time board member at OpenAI. Anthropic and Coefficient have traded personnel.

It isn’t just journalists, either. Vatican-affiliated groups and parachurch organizations like The Gospel Coalition have also weighed in on the dangers of AI. They’ve received funding from the Future of Life Institute, whose founder, Jaan Tallinn, led Anthropic’s Series A round of funding. To be fair, AI companies have also funded pro-AI stories on the accelerationist camp. Their goal seems to be influencing the conversation on both sides. The question is to what end.

The more cynical answer is that the AI mega-corps know they are in a race against time. Their current products are highly valuable, but the major question nagging them is whether open-source models can catch up to their closed-source counterparts before they can obtain their long-sought IPOs. As private companies, however, they cannot simply prevent the open-source models from improving.

If, however, the major private companies can establish themselves as the good, responsible actors in the room, they might lobby the government to create a regulator that decides which new models may be released to the public. If that happens, the major private labs buy themselves at least time and, at most, a permanent moat as AI becomes something like a defense contractor. Not just anyone is allowed to build a fighter jet, surface-to-air missile, or nuclear weapon in the United States. And the biggest customer, after all, would be the U.S. taxpayer. The only thing better than going public on the stock market is going public on the taxpayer dole.

Of course, the fact that AI titans appear to be cynically trying to manage their own regulation doesn’t mean they are wrong about the dangers their products pose to the public. However, if AI is as dangerous as they claim, why do they continue developing ever more powerful systems and selling their services to the public? It is reasonable to assume the danger is not as great as the worst predictions suggest, just as the fears of mass job loss from three years ago were overblown. If the rise of nuclear-armed states has taught us anything, it is that government regulation alone is not going to stop the development of a lucrative and dangerous technology.

A mass government crackdown on AI development is still a long way off. The Trump Administration is showing signs it is not buying the doomer hype; it wants development to continue and the market to set the pace. Given the options available to us, this is likely the best-case scenario.

Every few months, a new model is released, and independent testers explain how Claude’s Fable 5.1 compares to ChatGPT-6 Astra. And while Anthropic and OpenAI remain industry leaders, Grok and Gemini are nipping at their heels, open-source models are close behind, and the CCP is developing increasingly advanced AI behind closed doors.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the United States must continue to advance its AI capabilities, since unilateral disarmament means China will win the AI arms race. To do this, we need vigorous competition at home—and that means avoiding regulation that entrenches today’s market leaders. Dario Amodei’s concern about RSI is largely a mirage, as it has yet to be proven. The loop may get longer, but humans are remaining—and should remain—in it. Meanwhile, the Hugging Face incident provides a powerful argument against what Amodei’s “Pace the Frontier” essay advocates.

Our best hope for cybersecurity is to harden our own defenses with the most advanced AI available—and to do so as soon as possible. Whoever is caught pacing the frontier is likely to get scalped. We must instead advance and conquer the frontier.

The post The AI Capitalists in Search of Cronies appeared first on The American Mind.

A Baltimore-area shooting range is drawing attention over its contract to provide firearms training for ICE. Government records show the relationship dates back to 2020.

The post Local News Tried to Cancel a Maryland Range Over ICE Training appeared first on The Truth About Guns.