New York Post Does the Same

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The New York Post condemned Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, over his refusal to condemn Hamas, the terrorist organization that invaded Israel two years ago, butchering Israeli women and children, raping Israeli women, and seizing hundreds of hostages, many of whom have been killed in captivity and many more of whom still are held by the terrorists.

The condemnation is entirely appropriate.

However, the NYP then proceeded to commit the same offense in the second paragraph of its article:

Mamdani stopped short of condemning the militant group after Netanyahu used his defiant address to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday to declare that Israel must “finish the job” in its war against Hamas.

No. Hamas is not a militant group. Far from it. Hamas is a terrorist organization through and through. I would have thought the NYP‘s publisher, if not its editors, knew better than this. Apparently, I’m too optimistic.

“We cannot normalize”

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ICE and CBP are patrolling downtown Chicago and arresting criminals along the way. DHS noted that (with accompanying images)

11 violent rioters were arrested last night in Chicago outside the ICE detention facility: these are two guns that were taken off rioters in Chicago right against the fence at our ICE detention facility. An investigation is underway into what appears to be some sort of explosive device found last night near the ICE Chicago detention facility.

Progressive-Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is dismayed, and he’s hyping the fact that ICE and CBP agents are armed in a dangerous city while they go about their intrinsically dangerous job of law enforcement. He said this, too:

We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert.

Neither can we normalize violent lawlessness, even in Chicago. We do know our rights, we are staying alert, and so do—and are—those law enforcement personnel. Pritzker, though, would rather protect the criminals rampant in one of his State’s major cities than protect the residents of that city.

A Glittering Generality

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This one is from Republican candidate for Ohio Governor, Vivek Ramaswamy:

Instead of viewing AI as competition, the next generation should own a stake in improving America’s economic productivity. If every child has $10,000 invested in the S&P 500, every one of them would be a millionaire well before retirement.

From where would that initial $10k stake come? If it’s handed to “every child” from outside (vis., government), that child would have no skin in that game, and he would not find himself at pains to protect that stake by actively participating in improving our economic productivity—for instance, by getting a job and working to his employer’s goals or starting his own business and working to make it grow and prosper. The money would just be found money of no personal value.

On top of that, Ramaswamy did not address another aspect of this “plan:” what does he think the value would be of those millions of dollars in the child’s end game of retirement after a long and fruitful life of doing…something? An increase of all that nominal wealth without a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, will simply drive up the cost of those goods and services, which is otherwise known as inflation. Those millions of dollars may well wind up with the purchasing value of today’s thousands of dollars.

This is a plan that sounds good in its base outline, but it badly wants cold, clear-eyed fleshing out with facts; hard logic; and clear, publicly measurable steps to be taken. Especially, but not exclusively, the steps needed to keep productivity growth up with S&P 500 growth in an environment where today’s and lots of prior year’s S&P 500 growth—its price to earnings ratio—has been outstripping goods and services—productivity–growth.

Part of the Problem

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The Department of Defense, first under the Biden administration, but continuing under the Trump administration, is having far too much trouble deploying “AI weapons,” even figuring out how to use those it has deployed. An illustration of this is this:

The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

This isn’t so much a software commonality or interoperability problem as it is a problem with bureaucrats giving too much weight to the desires of contractors and their lobbyists, each of whom insist on their own proprietary software. What’s needed here isn’t more money (although sometimes that helps), it’s an operational officer, one fresh in from a combatant command that’s facing current conflicts, being put in charge of AI development and programs. This officer, independent of the lobbyists, needs to write a better requirements document, one that specifies the standards of commonality (not merely interoperability—this is software, not hardware) that each contractor and contractor wannabe must meet in order for their AI package to be considered.

Beyond that, this AI OIC must open his Requests for Proposals far beyond the major contractors and take in RFPs from small businesses and startups—that’s where the ideas and agility exist—then push the development and acquisition pace, eliminating the layers of bureaucrats’ reviews.

Finally, this AI OIC must be willing to spend money on mistakes and dead ends rather than demanding (near) perfection at one stage before moving on to the next.

That’s just the development side. The AI OIC also must have four or five teams of operational officers—again, fresh in from combatant commands—working on tactics and strategies that make use of the four or five leading AI weapons candidates to investigate best uses for integrating these weapons into a combatant command unit’s (at all levels) existing suite of weapons. That tactics and strategies development effort should also lead to adjustments in those units’ existing tactics and those commands’ existing strategies, even their existing suites of weapons.

There’re just too much bureaucracy and too little operational consideration in the currently extant DoD. SecDef is making progress on the bureaucracy qua bureaucracy, but he’s got a long way to go. It’s time for him to zero in on lethality.

Should We Forgive Barry Bonds?

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That’s the lead-off question The Free Press asked in its Wednesday piece. The article then just beat around the bush on the matter while spilling endless pixels on the marketability of Bonds memorabilia and those of other disgraced baseball players, and on other baseball players alleged (with greater or lesser amounts of supporting data) to have cheated. But Bonds did cheat—he used performance enhancing drugs.

So: should we forgive Barry Bonds? Of course; we should have done so a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean we should forget his cheating. That cheating was of a magnitude—increasing, for instance the number of hits and the number of homeruns he would have gotten absence his PED use—that he has been, and rightly should continue to be, barred from baseball’s Hall of Fame. The stats he accrued from his PED use overshadowed other, honest, players and deprived them of their leading stats.

That some other players similarly cheated, or seriously violated other baseball rules (viz., betting on baseball games) in no way absolves Bonds. The existence of those other cheats and baseball’s spotty record regarding them only point up baseball’s atrociously inconsistent enforcement of its own rules.

And: just to drive home the point, forgiving is not the same as forgetting, and it’s long past time to stop conflating the two.