A Powerful Security Tool

That’s what Anthropic’s Mythos package is. Anthropic already has released it to 50 companies and organizations, and now it wants to release Mythos to an additional 70. This would be a terrible mistake of highly destructive proportions for our national security. The White House is entirely correct to object and to move to get Anthropic to not release it further.

In my not very humble opinion, the 50 releasees already are ‘way too many. As The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer noted, Mythos is fully capable of find[ing] and exploit[ing] software vulnerabilities.

As such, Mythos is the beginnings of both a powerful offensive weapon and a critically proactive defensive tool. Release it too widely, and it becomes a powerful offensive weapon and critically proactive defensive tool in the hands of our enemies. Leaks happen. As the adage so correctly has it, telling a secret to three people makes it no longer secret. Fifty is dangerously larger than three, and those additional seventy guarantee widespread access to Mythos by our enemies.

The better solution would be to leave Mythos in its currently restricted release state, and let Anthropic, or DHS/DoD apply it on request to any company wanting its software inspected for vulnerabilities. Let DHS/DoD encourage companies above a size (TBD) to ask for the inspection, with that inspection coming at a nominal fee. Companies above that size that do not apply for a Mythos inspection that are then successfully cyber attacked should be fined heavily for their negligence. With the availability of a tool like Mythos, the existence of a successful cyber attack would be prima facie evidence of the victim’s negligence.

Dangerously Naïve Assumption

Matthew Continetti, in his Free Expression piece, had this early on:

Yet Democrats are looking at the wrong maps. They’re winning the gerrymander battle while losing the larger war for America’s future. Their state machines produce Democratic victories, but from a shrinking base. Their populations are fleeing high taxes and housing shortages for Republican strongholds. Nor are Democrats prepared for 2030, when the decennial census will realign national politics toward the GOP-friendly South.

As Continetti noted,

House Minority Leader Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) threatened retaliation and summed up his party’s philosophy: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

But he missed the implications of that, and that miss falsifies his underlying assumption that the Census Bureau count and subsequent House Representatives reallocation will occur in the normal fashion. That’s a dangerous miss, but he’s not alone in making that naïve assumption. No one in the press is thinking about the effect on the Census Bureau of Progressive-Democratic Party victories in the next two elections.

When the Progressive-Democrats gain control of the House and possibly the Senate after the 2026 elections, retain House control and retain or gain the majority in the Senate while winning the White House in the 2028 elections, this is what Party will do. First, it will use its Senate majority, possibly as early as January 2027, to gain outright control of the Senate by eliminating the filibuster altogether. That’ll be bad enough, devolving us from the liberty-preserving republican democracy of our present government structure to the tyranny of popular democracy.

Next, they’ll rescind any requirement for voters to show ID in order to vote, and they’ll lift restrictions on who is allowed to cross our border and under what conditions. To prevent States like Texas from doing their own border enforcement, they’ll pack the Supreme Court in order to get the judicial rulings they want regarding immigration and voting rights.

Finally, they’ll use all of that to cement for generations Party control over the popular democracy they will have created: they’ll alter the rules of counting the Census Bureau is required to use to prevent just that Representative reallocation in order create and preserve their Electoral College advantage.

There’s one more step that will put a big, blue bow on it. Many of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States are making agreements among themselves to have each State award its Electoral College votes to the Presidential candidate that wins the national-level popular vote. Interstate agreements or compacts are illegal without explicit Congressional approval of each agreement or compact attempted, per our Constitution’s Art I, Sect 10, Clause 3. The Party-run Congress will promptly approve those agreements.

Our nation faces nation-defining elections in 2026 and 2028. The futures of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren depend on the outcomes of those elections.

Voting is a Two Step Process

Elections by ballot, whether by secret ballot, as in the US, or by candidate-coded ballots, often by color, as early on in the US and in sham-election nations, are a two step process: voters mark their ballots, indicating the candidates for whom they’re voting, and they then cast their ballots—put them into a ballot receptacle at a polling station approved by each State’s elections process agency—to be collected and counted.

Mail-in ballots complicate voting, and their arrival after Election Day while still being considered legitimately cast unnecessarily threaten our elections’ integrity. The question of whether mass-mailed late ballots should be counted has arrived on the Supreme Court docket.

Election Day is a nationally statutory date—a single day. Ballots arriving after that day are not cast on Election Day because they’ve not arrived to be cast. It’s bad enough that too many precincts on up to States, whether by dishonesty or incompetence, don’t (not can’t) finish counting the ballots cast by the end of the day, without allowing those not yet cast by Election Day to be counted.

Mississippi law says absentee ballots that are postmarked on time are valid even if officials don’t receive them from the mailman until a week later. Other states have similar rules. The question for the Justices: does accepting tardy mail votes violate the federal law that sets a uniform Election Day?

Mississippi’s argument:

Mississippi suggests that once the US Postal Service takes custody of any outstanding ballots, then the election’s winner is already determined, however long it takes the mail to arrive and the result to become clear. “An election occurs when the voters have cast their ballots,” the state says. “The voters have then chosen and their choice is conclusive: the election is over. An election thus does not depend on when ballots are received.”

That’s the fallacy of the State’s argument. The USPS has never taken custody of a voter’s ballot; it only accepts custody. The responsibility to actually cast that ballot remains the voter’s, and his ballot is not cast until it makes it into the ballot box. His election, therefore, has not occurred until after Election Day if the USPS fails its custody acceptance by delivering the ballot after Election Day has ended and the polls have closed.

It seems straightforward: if the ballots aren’t received until after Election Day, then they weren’t cast by Election Day, and so they cannot be valid. Even if a voter chooses not to cast his ballot himself, instead trusting to a third party, even one as nominally trustworthy as the US Postal Service, the failure to get those ballots into the ballot box remains that voter’s, not the delivering party—even the USPS.

As Joseph Stalin said, it is extremely important who will count the votes and how. It’s imperative for our elections’ integrity that the counting be strictly controlled, especially including limiting the counting to the period beginning after voting precincts close in the State and ending as soon as possible after that, ideally by midnight of Election Day.

Bogus

A Wall Street Journal article on the requirements to vote under the SAVE Act had this bit of nonsense:

What happens if someone doesn’t have a passport or birth certificate?
The University of Maryland estimated in 2023 that more than 21 million American citizens don’t have ready access to a passport or other documentary evidence of citizenship. ….

Birth certificates are, most definitely, readily available, even if they’re not already in the prospective voter’s immediate possession. It’s straightforward to write to the hospital in which he was born, or the county, if the hospital is no longer operational. Even adoptees, in almost all cases, can determine their birthplace; it’s in their adoption records. It’s a bit more cumbersome when the adoption records have been sealed, but many of those can be opened by a court and the birthplace revealed. The few cases where that’s still not possible are very few, indeed, and present no excuse at all for blocking securing our elections against voter fraud. The fee for birth certificate copies is nominal.

Passports also are readily available; although the timeline for getting one is longer, and the fee is larger.

And this:

What about people who change their name when they get married or due to other circumstances?
The legislation doesn’t explicitly mention married voters or name changes, but does account for situations where a voter’s documents might not perfectly align by addressing “discrepancies in documentation.” Under the bill, an applicant would need to provide additional documentation to election officials to prove their citizenship.

In the particular case of married voters—the vast majority of whom are women—the changed name is an easily solved non-issue. It’s straightforward here, as with birth certificates, to write to the county where the marriage license/certificate was issued. Again, the fee is nominal. Most women in common law marriages haven’t changed their names. Those few occasions where they did and cannot provide documentation can follow the alternative procedures; in any event, these cases also present no excuse for holding up securing our elections.

Those who’ve changed their names “due to other circumstances” can write to the court in which they changed their name and get a copy of the documents recording the change. Here, too, the fee is nominal. The timeline for getting the copies might vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The plaint that evidence of voter fraud being scant is a red herring. It exists; this is an easy way to reduce it further. The thousands of “voters” illegally present in States’ voter rolls presents far too exploitable an opening for fraud. The fact that someone never locks his house door and hasn’t been robbed presents no rationale for continuing the foolishness.

This sort of misinformation, more likely borne of lazily repeating other news writers’ claims rather than doing actual original reporting, is yet another reason why it’s increasingly difficult to take a new writer’s natter seriously.

Selected Results from Texas’ Primary Elections

Via NPR, with 93% or more of the votes counted:

Texas Governor primary: 12,800 more Progressive-Democrats voted than Republicans

Senate: 110,518 more Progressive-Democrats

Via NBC News, with more than 91% of the votes counted:

Attorney General: 19,588 more Republicans than Progressive-Democrats

I have little information concerning how these results compare with the history of Texas primaries. These differences strike me as small—0.6% of the total vote in the Governor races, 2.5% in the Senate race, and 0.5% in the AG race.

For comparison, though, putting the current results into a measure of context, here are the 2022 primary results, via The Texas Tribune. Neither Texas Senate seat was up for election:

Governor: 841,244 more Republicans voted than did Progressive-Democrat voters, a difference of some 29% of the total vote.

Attorney General: 907,758 more Republicans voted, a difference of some 31%.

While more Republicans voted in the 2026 primaries, the large swing in those differences—30 percentage points—is from a doubling of Progressive-Democrat voter turnout in 2026 over 2022.

Republicans need to take this to heart and work hard, not only on getting the voters out to the polls, but especially on giving them a reason to come out. Republicans need to get out of their comfy offices and talk directly to their constituents, in person, as well as in local radio and television interviews and op-eds in their local news papers, addressing in specific, concrete terms, measurable by their constituents, what the candidates will do (not just what they have done) to make those voters’ lives better at the gas pump, with their utility bills, at the grocery stores—focusing here on what they actually eat, not some mythical basket of food—and on mortgage, rent, and house insurance costs.

If they don’t do that, Texas will turn blue. And that will be a disaster for our State and for our republic.