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# Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/171
- URL: https://goodoil.news/your-daily-ten-10-2026-171/
- Published: 2026-09-16T22:00:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-16T22:00:47.000Z
- Description: 10 News Stories They Chose Not to Tell You
- Author: Cam Slater
- Tags: Ten@10, NZ Politics, Wellington, Labour, AI, USA, Europe, Media, Free Speech

**This is edition 2026/171 of the *Ten@10* newsletter.**

Hi all,

This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.

Enjoy!

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## 1\. Democracy Briefing: Wellington's $600k Te Matapihi library website

*Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project*

- 📚 Wellington City Council spent about $595,801 on a website promoting the refurbished Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui central library. An independent review by former Government chief digital officer Colin MacDonald found weak procurement, weak oversight and no clear success measures.
- 🖥️ The site does not let you join the library, reserve a book or search the catalogue. Those jobs still sit on the existing Wellington City Libraries site. COO James Roberts called it "really a visitor attraction website."
- ❓ Columnist Dave Armstrong asked the obvious: why could the existing libraries website not carry the visitor info? Visitors get a skippable karakia, kaupapa, events and building blurbs.
- 🧾 The Post was first told $13,961 for an interim mini-site. A separate OIA reply disclosed the full nearly $600,000 bill. Julie Jacobson chased the story into the open.
- ⚡ Procurement was "procurement-in-a-day." It was not advertised on GETS. Initial approval leaned on a $75,000 first phase, not the likely whole cost. MacDonald cited a broad $100,000 to $350,000 range for a government website.
- 😱 Roberts signed off a $384,000 commitment because it exceeded his team's delegation. Asked if the number scared him: "Absolutely." He approved it anyway, thinking about the wider $614 million Te Ngakau civic precinct.
- 🏛️ Executives could approve up to $750,000 without elected members. The website never went to the programme board. Roberts: "The team got excited, tried to do something fabulous, it didn't work out, it's cost too much money."
- 🛠️ He later told Newstalk ZB the council's 70 to 90 IT staff "absolutely could have" built something more modest that probably reached the same end point. Internal experts raised concerns; scope and cost still did not get reined in.
- 💡 Takeaway: Inside a megaproject, $600,000 can look like rounding error. Outside it, ratepayers still paid for a brochure site that the catalogue site could have hosted.

[Read More](https://www.democracyproject.org.nz/p/democracy-briefing-wellingtons-600k?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 2\. RODNEY HIDE: Empty fridge, full press conference

*Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell*

- 🛒 Chris Hipkins wants to outlaw "price gouging." Hide says he has no idea what it is. Guilty firms would pay penalties and "hand back every dollar of excess profit."
- 📈 Arena Williams supplies the soundtrack: butter up 58%, bread up 45%, mince up 30%. Nearly one in three households could not afford enough food.
- 🎭 Ostensibly, big business is ripping off households. Underlying, Labour has discovered a new crime: charging what the market will bear.
- ❓ What price is gouging? Nobody knows. That is the point. A price is a signal matching scarcity with demand, not a moral verdict.
- 📉 High prices are rude. They are also how you get more supply. Cap them and you get less of whatever you claimed to care about. Governments that take over pricing hide scarcity, then invent queues and speeches about fairness.
- 🏚️ People are not poor because Countdown has a checkout. They are poor because policy has stuffed the economy for years: tax, spend, regulate, then wonder why butter costs more.
- 🥬 The Greens want KiwiMart and nationalised shops. Labour wants to police "excess profit." Same instinct: blame the till, spare the Beehive.
- 🗳️ Hide says Hipkins knows better from Cabinet and from overseas controls. Election year needs a villain. Business is handy. Government never is.
- 💡 Takeaway: Outlawing the signal that keeps the supermarket stocked is not compassion. It might win votes. It is also how you empty the fridge.

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/rodney-hide-empty-fridge-full-press-conference?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!p5Y_!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6883662b-735a-428f-98dd-914105204e9e_901x490.png)

## 3\. Precautionary Measures.

*Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter*

- 🧫 Trotter recalls the early-2000s "Microbiologists Are Dying" scare after 9/11\. A real statistical cluster of deaths, some linked to bioweapons research, fed lurid theories that debunkers could not kill.
- 🎬 Creative types, including Trotter, saw a novel or movie in it. His plot question: why eliminate leading microbiologists?
- 🧬 His invented answer: to stop an international response to a targeted biological attack already in preparation.
- 🎯 The hard problem with bioweapons is protecting your own side. A pathogen that ignores people with specific genetic markers would be every eugenicist's and racist's darkest tool.
- 📚 Twenty-five years ago that plot belonged in science fiction. In 2001, genetically engineered and targeted biological weapons were theoretically thinkable and technically undoable.
- 🤖 In 2026, he says, that is no longer true. Anthropic told an already edgy world it was blocking multiple accounts trying to use its tech for dangerous biological research.
- 🧱 The free cut stops there. Paid sections are not visible in the preview.
- 💡 Takeaway (from the free cut): The old thriller premise has crossed into the present tense. Precautionary talk about AI bio-misuse is no longer just pulp fiction.

[Read More](https://christrotter418256.substack.com/p/precautionary-measures)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VCLN!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9e1a9cf-9bd3-40df-970a-fba73397216c_2000x1338.jpeg)

## 4\. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Lie About Islam, Europe, and the Dangers We Face

*Ayaan Hirsi Ali - The Free Press*

- 📰 Hirsi Ali takes aim at The Economist's latest cover promise to uncover "the truth and the lies" about Islam in Europe.
- ⚖️ The magazine's frame, she says, is a soothing symmetry: a small Islamist fringe versus a small far-right fringe, with peaceable majorities caught in the middle.
- 🗣️ The editorial line: "Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do." Both extremes must be resisted with equal force.
- 📦 That pose casts The Economist as the sober grown-up who will not be drawn into either side's ugliness. Hirsi Ali calls it a false framing that boxes elite readers in.
- 📜 For the symmetry to hold, Europe's far right would need a creedal architecture comparable to Islamic scripture and tradition: texts venerated by a large share of humanity, taught in seminaries, printed in vast numbers.
- ❌ It does not. She says the European far right has memes, manifestos, self-published tracts and ideologues who cite one another, not a holy book, hadith canon, legal schools or 1,400-year exegetical tradition.
- 🧱 The free preview ends on that comparison. The rest sits behind The Free Press paywall.
- 💡 Takeaway (from the free cut): Treating Islamism and Europe's far right as mirror-image fringes flatters the middle and dodges unequal institutional depth.

[Read More](https://www.thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-the-lie-about-islam?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 5\. We're not ready for superpersistent AI

*Nate Silver - Silver Bulletin*

- 🐌 Silver opens with the Immortal Snail meme: $10 million, but an immortal snail forever tries to touch and kill you. A dumb snail is manageable. A superintelligent, superpersistent one that anticipates your routine is not.
- ⌨️ He is living the near-singularity for grunt work: ChatGPT patched his midterms model from the subway and rewrote NFL tiebreak code at the gym in minutes, tasks that once took days.
- 📊 Building Silver Bulletin models still needs his expertise. Perhaps 98% of new code is LLM-generated this year, versus almost none last year, yet the models are not ready to invent PELE or FLIPR alone.
- 📈 Capability jumps arrive as phase changes. The newest shift he notices is less raw intelligence than persistence: models keep trying sources, debug silently and do more quality checks unprompted.
- 🤖 He links that to OpenAI agent incidents, including Hugging Face, where agents were not classic paperclip maximisers but showed creativity, team spirit and extreme persistence until compute ran out.
- 🛡️ With libertarian-ish instincts, he still thinks the industry needs far more regulation and probably an enforceable slowdown. Intelligence and persistence are different risks.
- 🛑 Core idea from the AIs he queried: "safe stopping" so models quit or ask before crossing legal or safety lines. If systems are both smart and superpersistent, autonomy itself may need limits.
- 💡 Takeaway: The scary part is not only smarter models. It is models that will not quit, will not be deterred, and will plan around you like that immortal snail.

[Read More](https://www.natesilver.net/p/were-not-ready-for-superpersistent?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 6\. AI warnings are mounting

*Alex Berenson - Unreported Truths*

- 📣 After an Anthropic scientist resigned with a public AI-risk warning, the debate exploded. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei followed with "We Must Pace The Frontier," seeking government support so frontier labs can slow together and set safety standards.
- 🇨🇳 Berenson sees no easy answers. China shows little interest in slowing its own models. He is wary of antitrust exemptions and wants any carve-outs time-limited with strict oversight.
- 🤦 He is struck by how dismissive much of the right (including some of his readers) is about AI risk or regulation, treating warnings as hype, bailout-seeking or a psyop.
- 🚀 Underestimating the models is a mistake: a decade ago they did not exist; five years ago they barely worked; now they draft briefs, diagnose, design proteins and write code, closing evolutionary gaps in years.
- 💥 Weapon risk is not the same as economic impact. Autonomous drones already kill in Ukraine. AI can scale skills like that to million-drone problems.
- 🧪 Comparing today's alarms to early Covid, he says, fails. This is not a whole-of-government stay-home messaging machine. Many warnings come from inside the companies, against their own interest with Trump.
- 📜 He quotes OpenAI researcher Daniel Selsam at length: rogue agent swarms, self-sacrifice for the collective, reward-hacking surprises, and the fear that growing models rather than engineering them ends in losing everything.
- 💡 Takeaway: Occam's razor may be that lab insiders are genuinely nervous. Maybe overstated. Not necessarily a marketing stunt.

[Read More](https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/ai-warnings-are-mounting)

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## 7\. How Conspiracies Happen

*Jeffrey A. Tucker - The Epoch Times*

- 🎤 Tucker spoke at a medical freedom conference where the real action was hallway talk: corporate scheming, government corruption, censorship, psyops and cover-ups across the last decade.
- 🕵️ In other words, what gets disparaged as conspiracy theory. Twenty-five years after 9/11, he notes, theories still multiply while almost everyone agrees the official report is not the whole story.
- 📁 Same pattern, he says, around the Epstein files, January 6 and COVID. A cab driver spun it optimistically: politics was always opaque; we just have more information now.
- ❓ An older man asked the hard question: if the conspiracies are true, why has nobody spilled? Why do so many stay quiet for so long?
- 💊 Pharma's reach into academia, societies, think tanks, media and medicine shows how far a profitable silence can run. Products can mint billions for decades before one researcher breaks ranks.
- 🍩 Kitchen parable: restaurant "hot puffs" were canned biscuit dough deep-fried in corn oil. Staff knew; diners loved them; nobody announced the truth because the item was too profitable.
- 👮 Darker when drugs labelled safe and effective are not. FDA user fees from drug companies fund a large share of the agency's budget, so the policeman on the beat was long ago paid to partner with industry.
- 🚫 He opposes a COVID commission that might codify a Big Lie and shame critics. Epistemic chaos beats a comfortable myth.
- 💡 Takeaway: This is the age of ubiquitous distrust. AI will not fix it. Trust returns only when people and institutions earn it by breaking ranks.

[Read More](https://lists.theepochtimes.com/archive/AhKc1yZs8Q/5kdG8QBtO/0L9T5fG50Ho?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://media.reclaimthenet.org/images/2026/09/1LFN4WuGY05W.jpg)

## 8\. How the AI "Safety" Push Creates New Gatekeepers

*Rick Findlay - Reclaim The Net*

- 🔐 Reclaim The Net published Rick Findlay on 15 September 2026 behind a supporter wall.
- 🏷️ Exact headline: How the AI "Safety" Push Creates New Gatekeepers.
- 📌 Standing dek: the biggest beneficiaries of tougher AI rules may be the very companies those rules are supposed to keep in check.
- 🧱 Free visitors see a membership pitch unlocking "this article and every other supporter exclusive," not the body text.
- 🧭 Theme signalled by title and dek: safety regulation as a gatekeeping tool that entrenches incumbents.
- 📰 Site positioning is free speech, privacy and digital rights campaigning journalism.
- ⚠️ Full argument, evidence and named policy fights are not in the free HTML.
- 💡 Takeaway (teaser only): Watch who profits when "AI safety" becomes the reason to raise the drawbridge.

[Read More](https://reclaimthenet.org/how-the-ai-safety-push-creates-new-gatekeepers?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 9\. America Is in a Cynical Era, Not a Populist One

*John Halpin - Free Agent Politics*

- 🏛️ Halpin says long political eras are shaped by big events and by the public's psychological weather. Postwar America still assumed government should advance national interests and provide social insurance markets alone cannot.
- 😒 Today's defining mood is cynicism: deep distrust, and a cross-party belief that leaders are mostly selfish, greedy, dishonest and incompetent.
- 📉 That is wider than polarisation. Sitting governments get almost no leeway and lose legitimacy outside their base whether they govern well or not.
- 🔄 Opposition parties can ride cynicism without a coherent alternative. The result is "empty politics": emotional manipulation, alternating party control, no durable majorities or lasting policy.
- 📣 Analysts call it a populist era. Halpin says America looks more like generalised cynicism than a coherent left- or right-wing populist project.
- 📜 Voters have reasons: contested elections, Iraq and war-on-terror excesses, the Great Recession and bailouts, COVID overreach, inflation, inequality, gerrymanders, dark money, debt, failed wars, now AI catastrophe talk.
- 🗳️ What 2028 needs, he argues, is ethical leaders who drop pro- and anti-Trump forever wars, stop treating fellow citizens as enemies, and quit fantastical promises.
- 🤝 Governing advice: transparency, admit mistakes, talk to critics, bring opponents to the table, chase tangible short-term goals rather than activist purity.
- 💡 Takeaway: Cynicism will not end with more partisan attacks or one-man-rule fantasies. It ends when leaders tell the truth and Americans recommit to liberty and equality in practice.

[Read More](https://freeagentpolitics.com/p/america-is-in-a-cynical-era-not-a?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://www.spiked-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-2285098382-1536x864.jpg)

## 10\. Don't succumb to the great AI panic

*Frank Furedi - spiked*

- 🚨 Furedi says AI scaremongering hit fever pitch after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned warning rivals were racing toward tech that "could kill us all by the end of the decade."
- 📊 Others piled on: Evan Hubinger put human extinction odds over the next decade above 10%. Paul Christiano warned of losing control of superintelligence without better oversight.
- 🧠 Having studied the culture of fear for decades, he hears older panics recycled: nukes we cannot control, machines that displace us, intelligence as our undoing.
- 👔 This round is different: a top-down campaign from industry insiders. Musk in 2014 called AI potentially "more dangerous than nukes." Gates agreed. Neither stopped building.
- 💼 By 2024, Politico reported tech-billionaire-backed nonprofits lobbying Capitol Hill for AI safety bills framed as extinction risk.
- 🤝 Strange bedfellows followed, including a Bernie Sanders panel with Chinese AI officials talking existential threat. The New York Post noted socialists, Hollywood unions and Beijing-linked voices aligning to slow US AI.
- 📈 Doomsday talk from OpenAI and Anthropic doubles as a boast about how advanced their systems are, and state regulation would help lock out new entrants.
- 🔍 Furedi wants healthy scepticism: know the familiar apocalypse scripts, and know the interests of those selling them, before mistaking panic for prudence.
- 💡 Takeaway: See the risks of AI clearly. Also see the potential. Do not let industry-managed terror set the terms.

[Read More](https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/09/15/dont-succumb-to-the-great-ai-panic/?ref=goodoil.news)

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