This is a Mistake

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The Trump administration, in the person of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, has decided to ban American gain-of-function research on the rationale that the risks to public safety or national security are too great for the gains.

This is a mistake, especially on national security grounds and public safety.

Our enemies are enthusiastically conducting gain-of-function research, as demonstrated by the PRC’s work on the Wuhan Virus. We need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand our enemies’ products and how to counter them in the event they loose their bioweapons deliberately.

We also need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand the mechanisms by which viruses, and bacteria, that are currently unique to animals or plants might cross species lines and infect humans, and were they to cross over, what effects they would have on us. That’s how we’ll be able to deal rapidly with a pandemic from such a virus or bacterium. We did nothing about the influenza pandemic of a century ago and got away with it. We don’t know if we were lucky, and we don’t know whether we might have mitigated its effects had we known more. It’ll be the same with any future global—or national—epidemic if we’re deliberately responding in the blind.

I’ve Said These Before

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However, they bear repeating.

The WSJ editors rightly warn against killing the Senate filibuster. Progressive-Democratic Party Senators already have committed to eliminating it as soon as they seize the majority. Ill-informed Republican Senators, along with unthinking Republican Senators and President Donald Trump (R), are pushing to eliminate the filibuster first on the idiocy that the Progressive-Democrats are going to do it, anyway, so why not, and on the excuse that it’s necessary in order to pass the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

The SAVE Act is, indeed, a critical piece of legislation, and one that the House already has passed, twice. However, it’s not worth the elimination of the filibuster, which would lead to far more and far wider damage to our Republic.

The loss of the filibuster would reduce the Senate to a simple majority rule popular contest, which along with the House’s simple majority rule would reduce our nation to a popular democracy and the elimination of our republican democracy.

With the filibuster intact, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD) should hold the vote, regardless of his view of the potential vote count. Average Americans need to know, ahead of this fall’s elections, which Senators of either party favor secure elections in which only American citizens vote, and which ones favor, openly or tacitly, elections in which non-citizens, including illegal aliens, are allowed to vote.

“Journalists Shouldn’t Have To Face That Risk”

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The “risk” that Judith Miller, of the Manhattan Institute, faced was going to jail (temporarily realized for all of three months as she refused to give up the source who’d illegally passed her national security information. Miller wants a shield law that would place journalists above the law.

This is typical—demonstrative—of the intrinsically arrogant and dishonest “industry” of which she is a part.

By Miller’s own admission, she had been given a leak of national-security information. This was an obvious illegal transferal, and everywhere outside the journalism guild, receiving stolen property like this “leak” was would itself be a crime.

Further to Miller’s dishonesty, she chose to conflate her subpoena with the recent badly done subpoenas for New York Time news writers as though badly done subpoenas justify tossing correctly done ones like the one that sent her to jail for three months.

Further to Miller’s dishonesty, she noted that she was released only when her contempt of court was cured by her source giving her permission to reveal him. No permission was necessary and no permission is necessary today: journalists must be required to give up their sources of illegally transferred information whether or not they choose to publish those stolen goods.

Shield law: she already has one, as she noted:

…Justice Department guidelines call for issuing subpoenas to journalists only as a last resort and after a thorough investigation fails to determine the source of the leak….

Along with our court system, which deals appropriately with subpoenas to journalists that do not meet those guidelines, just as the court did with those NYT subpoenas.

There is no right of confidentiality for journalist-source relationships, as there is for lawyer-client or doctor-patient, nor should there be. Even with those latter two relationships, lawyers and doctors are required to notify law enforcement or other appropriate authority of the fact of an impending crime if not of which of their clients or patients may be the impending criminal.

Finally, Miller doesn’t even know what national security-related information is:

National security wasn’t compromised by the Qatari plane stories….

Of course it was. The President’s change of movement plans in response to a perceived security threat, as that NYT article itself acknowledged, certainly was national security related, compromising as it did the President’s movement changes, the fact that our government knew about a threat in advance of its realization, and compromised that threat’s goal before they could attempt their move and be intercepted and arrested.

Constitutionally protected newsgathering is vital to a democracy.

Certainly. But there is no constitutional protection for receiving stolen goods. Neither is that protection necessary for effective newsgathering.

In one respect, though, Miller is right about facing the risk of jail. Jail for concealing the sources of illegally transmitted information should be a certainty. Even if the source is later identified. The illegal reception crime would still exist and still want jail in response.

Of Course They’re Eager

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President Donald Trump (R) says Iran is anxious to negotiate regarding the US-Iran conflict.

We’ve pretty much destroyed their military. They want to meet, and we’re meeting.

Of course Iran is. Any time spent “negotiating” is time for Iran to rest, refit, and recoup from its losses. he month Trump gave them earlier, or a week, or even just a day or two is highly beneficial for the terrorists.

It’s time to put an end to the Iranian charade. Let the bombings resume, much harder than before, add in cyber attacks, and give safe passage to Iranian decision makers when they decide to talk seriously—but keep the attacks going full bore while the talks occur until they reach a successful for us conclusion.

Iran otherwise is simply stalling and “negotiating” in bad faith.

Wrong Answer

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The subheadline contains the wrong answer, for those astute enough to see it, especially those more so than this op-ed‘s opinion writer, Judd Rosenblatt, who is the CEO of AE Studio and president of the AI Alignment Foundation:

The key is “alignment,” which improves capability while cordoning off dangerous knowledge.

Rosenblatt expanded on that not too much later in his piece:

…build the world’s most capable open-weight model in America, with the dangerous capabilities stripped out before release

Because nothing says limiting innovation and truncating freedom like censoring knowledge and capability. Never mind that that will limit and truncate only American innovation and knowledge; it’ll have no effect on our enemies.

He went on:

Using GRAM [Gradient-Routed Auxiliary Modules] to train language models, we found that knowledge about bioweapons, offensive cyber, and nuclear capabilities, and even antisemitism, could be routed into compartments, then removed. The released model behaved as if it never learned that information.
…
What matters is a safety standard that causes a dangerous capability to stay absent under adversarial testing.

The bioweapons, offensive cyber, and nuclear capabilities bits are seemingly obvious targets for censorship, but that knowledge is too easily compiled via a variety of sources, including other AI models that aren’t restricted. The real kicker, though, is that last: who gets to define what is a dangerous capability? And who sets the threshold between random data to information to knowledge? Will these Know Better definers decide that identifying or not defining hate speech (whatever that is) is a dangerous capability and the thresholds for that? Providing arguments for, or against, human involvement in global warming? Men in girls’ sports and bath- and locker rooms? Defining “woman?” Criticizing government? This list is endless.

The blatant…foolishness…of Rosenblatt’s idea makes me wonder about trolls and moles.