Category Archives: Uncategorized

Coming Around?

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Many of the Arab nations that as recently as this summer had been pushing for negotiations with Iran to end the fighting between Iran and the US are now trying to persuade President Donald Trump (R) not to negotiate. This comes on the heels of Iranian attacks on Saudi oil tanker shipping in the Arabian Gulf and Iran’s Houthi satrap seizing islands in the Red Sea to cut off Arab shipping there, and attacks by the Houthis and by Iran’s Iraqi supporters on the Saudi oil pipeline to the Red Sea coast and on the Saudi port there.

They’re waffling on that, though. Don’t start shooting again, they’re also pushing. Just maintain the blockade and the economic pressure.

Other Gulf states, mainly Oman and Qatar, argue the region already has suffered significantly and say proposals for a phased reopening of Hormuz and a halt to attacks on Gulf states are the only viable way to end the conflict.

They need to recognize the suffering they’ll continue to experience with Iran still a military and terrorist threat, unless they kowtow to the murderous regime. There’s no need for a “phased reopening” of the Hormuz Strait. There’s only a need for the IRGC to stop shooting at Strait shipping and to acknowledge in writing and in public speaking that the Strait is international waters and Iran has no authority to change that fact.

That change in the IRGC is unlikely. The IRGC, which is the real power in the Iranian government, isn’t interested in ending the fight except on its terms: the Hormuz Strait is Iranian water, and shipping must pay an Iranian toll to pass through it; Iran must be able to resume its nuclear weapons development without interference; and the US must pay reparations to Iran in addition to lifting all sanctions.

The Arab nations may be starting to figure out the real world around their Iran fantasy, but they’ve a ways to go, yet. That path begins with those nations getting their collective heads out of the sand while finding enough backbone to get their hands dirty: taking back those Red Sea islands; getting serious about running the Houthis out of Yemen; joining with actual military force instead of stern words in renewed and expanded attacks on Iran until that nation is completely disarmed and has no means of rebuilding its military, including its missile, rocket, and drone inventory; it has no means of even beginning, much less resuming, its nuclear weapons program; and the IRGC has seized to exist.

Progressive-Democratic Party Power Grab

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Now they’re coming for our children. Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democratic governor Maura Healey has announced a new State government program that will send a government nurse into every newborn’s home.

Everybody in the state, when you have a baby, you’re going to have a home visit within days, weeks and that will be an opportunity for a healthcare provider to make an assessment to see if you need some additional support and resources[.]

A government nurse, and the government’s assessment of “need.” This is Party’s claim that our children belong to Government; they are not our families’ youngest members. Healey’s rationalization is nothing but political points harvesting in the aftermath of Lindsey Clancy’s trial for murdering her children.

Postpartum depression, anxiety, and other maternal mental health conditions are real medical conditions, and no mother should feel ashamed to ask for help or feel like she has to navigate this journey alone.

She’s pretending to solve a problem of miniscule proportion. The scale of the problem as it regards infant safety is this. According to the Deseret News, there were 2,282 babies killed through their mothers’ “maltreatment;” of these 912 were from deliberately inflicted injury (things like fentanyl poisoning were deemed accidental maltreatment in the DN‘s wisdom) between 2022 and 2026. In the same period, per Google’s AI, there were 15,394,000 babies born. Those 900 babies outright murdered represent 0.009% of the births. Those killed through neglect/maltreatment amount to just 0.0015% of the births. That’s certainly a tragedy for the babies involved, but it is in no way a justification for a Government intrusion of Healey’s scale.

Healey claims the program is “voluntary.” Sure. Think of all the tools Government has with which to harass a family that declines this government “favor.” Think of the liability Government will seek to apply should an accident befall the child whose family declined this government intrusion. Think of all the negative publicity and innuendo Government can let slip regarding any family who declines this government intrusion. Along those latter lines, recall the social opprobrium that was inflicted (and still is inflicted) on those ordinary Americans who declined to be vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus.

Nice kid youse got there. Be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

This what we can look forward to if we let Party get control of our House of Representatives and our Senate this fall and of the White House in 2028.

“Growing Risks”

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That’s the concern about AI and its use in hacking that was written about in a recent WSJ article.

Two weeks after a swarm of AI agents broke out of containment at OpenAI to hack the company Hugging Face, the ChatGPT maker learned about another AI-powered intrusion—and this time it was the target.
Independent security researchers had used Anthropic‘s Claude software to gain access to an OpenAI employee’s ChatGPT account, giving them a way to read and suggest changes to the company’s private cache of software.

And this:

The team, who participated in an OpenAI bug-hunting program that offers a safe harbor for researchers to attempt to break into corporate systems, quickly reported their findings to the company. …
The new hack joins a long list of recent disclosures by leading technology companies and researchers alike of cyber intrusions aided by fast-evolving artificial-intelligence tools. Despite months of warnings about the capabilities of AI systems, the new intrusion shows how the complexity of today’s computer systems makes them difficult to defend.

Umm, no.

That breakout and hack of Hugging Face wasn’t an example of the risks of AI; it was an example of the risks from human failure to properly airgap the sandbox in which they were building and testing that swarm of agents.

The “difficulty to defend” today’s increasingly complex computer systems isn’t a matter of AI tools’ or swarms of AI tools’ ability to hack into complex (or simple) computer systems. The difficulty is the failure to use frequently, broadly, and deeply those AI tools to do the White Hat hacking those independent security researchers had done to expose some OpenAI bugs and gaps.

That White Hat hacking needs to be done by lots of security researchers all across our economy and our governments at all jurisdictional levels, so enterprises and governments can find their own software and system failures and repair them before outside entities with nefarious intent—whether government, criminal, or just folks poking around because they can—find them, penetrate them, and inflict their damage or steal critical information or demand ransom or…. And then the White Hat hacking needs to be repeated at frequent, irregular intervals so as to keep systems buttoned up and ahead of Black Hat and other adversarial hacking efforts.

The risk, and it is growing, is that that White Hat hacking isn’t being done as widely or frequently as it should be to identify those system gaps and bugs so they can be quickly sealed off. And make those difficult to defend systems more easily defended.

Instead, people who should know better insist on locking up AI with excessive regulation.

Crocodile Tears

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Journalism organizations that heretofore pooled resources in order to cover Presidential events that occurred in venues lacking space for all of the journalists have chosen to refuse to cover President Donald Trump’s (R) small-venue events in response to Trump’s decision to bar three of their number from the White House press pool over those three’s dishonest reporting on administration matters. (Notice that: the bar is over dishonest news reporting, not over opinionating and commentary, as the pressmen have been arguing, thereby demonstrating the reporting dishonesty being sanctioned.)

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” the pool members, FOX News Media, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News, said in a joint statement.

That’s just it, though. CNN‘s, MS NOW‘s, and Politico‘s news reporting has long been dishonest, and they’re not alone; they’re just the most egregious. That dishonesty begins with refusing to report all of the news—all of the facts underlying a news story—which is nothing more than lying by omission. This is a technique the broadcast outlets use especially broadly (viz., spiking the Hunter Biden laptop revelations of the New York Post). The outlets’ dishonesty extends to writing/broadcasting unattributed rumors—sourced to “anonymous,” or to “officials familiar,” even to mere “persons familiar.” That leaves us in their revered public with no means to check on those sources in order to evaluate for ourselves those sources’ qualifications on the subject matter, much less their actual presence in the alleged discussions. We can’t even evaluate whether those sources actually exist or if they do whether their claims are being accurately reported.

Overarching all of that is my long-standing question. Years ago, editors required at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymously sourced claims. Journalists have long since walked away from that requirement, raising the obvious question: what concrete, measurable, publicly accessible standard of journalistic integrity do today’s journalists use instead?

Journalists’ silence on that question is a loud, clear answer.

In the end, Trump is right: journalists have no intrinsic right to enter the White House. They have all kinds of sources and means of ferreting out news regarding the administration and its doings without being inside an office building, however big a deal the building might be. If nothing else, they can interact with their anonymous sources and officials/persons familiar as those folks come and go from the office building.

Complexifying Problems

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Kyle Smith opened his piece in The Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression with a summary of a survey on non-pilots landing a passenger airplane in an emergency. Included in that was this bit about women’s assessment of men’s ability to do so:

To the average woman, the idea that the average man could land a complicated passenger aircraft on his own is ridiculous.

Not only for women, though, the problem with working seemingly complex problems is the mindset that blindly goes along with over-complexifying the challenge.

As an F-106 driver I once worked with said about flying his jet, “Pull the stick back to go up, push forward to go down, left-right just like driving a car.”

The airliner is just the same, for all the dials and gauges and switches and levers in the cockpit. Not easy-peasy, but not that difficult, either.