Pick One

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In an article regarding Europe’s censors’ efforts to govern and limit American speech, Nathan Harden, RealClearEducation Editor, warned about AI packages embedding invisible and supposedly unremovable watermarks in writing (and eventually in imagery and recordings of speech, also) so that those censors can identify and block speech of which they personally disapprove. In the course of that, the author wrote this about Anthropic AI-generated watermarks in particular.

The marking technology subtly biases words the model picks, in a pattern Anthropic controls via a secret key. The watermark survives ordinary copy and paste, and there is no way to opt out. Anthropic says the mark carries no information that could identify a user and won’t affect the overall meaning of the text.

It isn’t possible to subtly bias words in a text without the overall meaning of that text being so influenced. Surely Anthropic’s managers understand this.

Harden then asked the critical question:

Americans should be asking a more fundamental question: Why is European law dictating how an American company produces words for Americans?

The answer is because [Anthropic’s] managers are all too willing to surrender to Europe’s censors in order preserve their precious presence there and not willing enough, if at all, to spend that energy preserving the freedoms of the nation that nurtured them and provided them the environment in which they grew and now prosper.

How, then, can [Anthropic] or its products be trusted in America or anywhere else?

A Remaining Question

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GSA says it has discovered more than $13 billion in suspected fraud by federal contractors since March.

Since then, the task force has announced a litany of fraud busts, spanning multiple agencies.

That’s just a small sample of the $250 billion in public funds fraud that the newly formed anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance (R) has found.

Left unaddressed, though, is what will GSA, DoJ, and the respective Department Secretaries and Agency Directors will do about those bureaucrats who enabled, if not actively facilitated, all of that fraud, whether out of personal ideology, crookedness, or incompetence? These also need to tracked down, prosecuted, and if convicted jailed for a good long time.

“Serious Legal Error”

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That’s what Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson claims the Supreme Court made when it lifted an injunction against President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order requiring, among other things, HHS to collect States’ voter registration rolls and the Post Office to work out procedures for not delivering mailed ballots to recipients who are not on those rolls. Her beef is that

the ruling could create election chaos and leave states trapped between filing legal challenges too early or too late.

And

“The Court does a disservice to all concerned by distorting Article III standing and ripeness principles to issue a ruling that contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” she wrote.

This is fatuous. If there is any uncertainty associated with drawing too close to Election Day, it’s not from Supreme Court, or any lesser court, ruling, it’s from the steady drumbeat of quibbling lawsuits from Leftists who want the ineligible to vote and from others pushing unserious boundary and corner cases just to see what trouble they can cause.

The majority dealt with that, whether they realized it or not by ruling the suit in the present case out of bounds because they’d suffered no injury because no procedure had yet been set up that caused or would cause injury.

Jackson wasn’t done.

Jackson said the decision “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

We’re supposed to believe that a lawyer so highly trained and so talented that she became a Supreme Court Justice is unable to work her way through a couple of clearcut rulings. This from a Supreme Court Justice who’s already confessed she’s not capable of saying what a woman is.

But she still wasn’t done.

“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize,” Jackson wrote….

Here she is, claiming to be able to read minds.

Good grief.

A Good Start

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President Donald Trump (R), through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has announced Operation Economic Outcast, a far more broad based and farther reaching set of economic sanctions on Iran than any prior set.

It’s a badly needed expansion of the economic circumcision of Iran, but it assumes that the terrorists running Iran will feel the pain of the cutoffs and isolation that Iranian citizens will experience. That’s unlikely, since those terrorists don’t care about their subjects, only about their personal power and their mantra of destruction.

A kinetic component remains badly needed.

Sanctioned oil tankers need to be seized wherever they are, whether or not they still have Iranian oil on board, and they need to be sold to legitimate shippers or to breakers.

The roads, railroads, bridges, and pipelines in Iran that carry oil, natural gas, and other cargo toward the People’s Republic of China need to be cut in several places, with the servicing repeated as necessary.

Shipping in the Caspian Sea that carries Iranian goods to Russia or to other nations on that Sea for transshipment to Russia and that carry foreign goods to Iran need to be sunk.

These kineticisms won’t impact the terrorists’ pain threshold enough to get them to accept the terms of renouncing and dismantling their nuclear weapons program and acknowledging that the Hormuz Strait is international water and not controlled or influenced by Iran. They will, though, severely circumscribe the terrorists’ ability to do much of anything beyond Iran’s borders.

The Cat’s Out of the Bag

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One of President Donald Trump’s (R) advisors, Jared Kushner, met with Progressive-Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), ostensibly to seek out areas of “common ground” in advance of Jeffries’ ascension to House Speaker in January.

The Left has been ripping at its collective bodice ever since news of the meeting broke. I also disagree with the usefulness of the meeting, but for different reasons. The first is that Jeffries cannot be trusted to keep any agreement, formal or tacit, out loud or unspoken, with a President or a Party whose members he’s spent his time in the House smearing as unpatriotic threats to democracy and/or personally dishonest.

This corroborates my position:

Jeffries said the only way the Democrats and the Trump administration would come to agreements on issues would be if Republicans were willing to give ground to Democrats on cost-of-living issues, which is the Republican’s top priority.

Nothing about his party giving ground to Republicans on any question. Nothing about compromise at all. This is Jeffries’ statement that he will lead Party to pass legislation without Republican input that isn’t Republican surrender. This is Jeffries’ statement that he and Party will simply dictate legislation and non-Party Representatives can go hang.

This is corroborated by Party’s commitment to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate as soon as they get a majority there, enabling Party to impose its will on us Americans wholly independently of any other party input and utterly without compromise.

That arrogance makes Jeffries and Party entirely untrustworthy.