Mistaken Responsibility

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A letter writer in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote of the need for cooperation in the American-Israeli war against Iran. He was right that the war would benefit from the cooperation of serious players. He had this, though, on that war:

Making the case to other nations helps legitimize the mission and its necessity.

This is the letter-writer’s misapprehension. The legitimacy of the mission and its necessity is inherent in that mission: Iran is the world’s moneybags for terrorists and terrorist activities, the most significant of which are Iran’s satraps, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, which it would promptly use to erase Israel and to peddle to terrorists for use outside the Middle East. Iran is bent on building ICBMs with which to shoot its nuclear bombs at us.

The mission is the elimination of Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons, the elimination of Iran’s ability to build missiles of any reach, the elimination of Iran’s ability to fund or otherwise support other terrorists anywhere. Those efforts have been badly damaged by the actions of last summer and, so far, the current mission.

This war has cooperation between the serious players: the US and Israel. Natterers, including the British PM and the German Chancellor, though, are not at all serious players.

The responsibility for cooperating with the US and Israel and joining the mission lies solely with those “other nations.” Their decisions to remain absent, to shirk their responsibility to Europe for the restoration of oil and natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz, says volumes about their alleged reliability in any crisis.

So far, Japan has signed on to assist with reopening the Strait of Hormuz amid the war with Iran. So, lately, have France, Germany, Italy, and Netherlands after their initial reluctance. The five nations’ joint statement can be read here. The TL;DR is this:

We condemn in the strongest terms recent attacks by Iran on unarmed commercial vessels in the Gulf, attacks on civilian infrastructure including oil and gas installations, and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces.
…
We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning.

Whatever “appropriate effort” means. “Preparatory planning” is just a weasel-word phrase meaning “but we’re in no hurry to do anything more than shake our fingers in the strongest terms.”

Japan’s assistance likely will be concrete; the units they send would gain valuable experience when the People’s Republic of China attacks the Republic of China and Japan needs to respond in answer of its commitment to RoC and to protect its South and East China Seas holdings. Those European nations? They’ll be busy hiding behind their definition of “appropriate effort” while they endlessly plan.

Black Boxes

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Folks buying into a private lending fund are learning, I trust, a valuable lesson, and the rest of us should take that lesson to heart, also. This is especially the case when the fund restricts withdrawals. The fund singled out by The Wall Street Journal for its example is Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund.

Investors are fleeing the $42 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, among the latest of its kind to limit redemptions for shareholders. Many investors appear to believe the private-credit fund’s official net asset value is inflated, prompting them to sell their shares, or try to.
One reason many are rushing for the exits: it can be difficult for shareholders to understand what they own. The disclosures at funds like this often are as impenetrable as they are voluminous.

If the claims are not independently verifiable, including by a potential investor, they are not reliable, and a potential investor should not invest.

This, though, is not an excuse for Government to step in and “regulate.” Caveat emptor; investors, like any other American, ought to face the consequences—good or bad—of their decisions on their own, without government taking tastes from successes or doing bailouts for failures.

AI Isn’t all that I

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And it’s unlikely to be so anytime soon.

A human brain contains 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion synaptic connections. That’s a thousand, or more, connections per neuron. A human brain’s cortex alone contains approximately 20 billion neocortical neurons, with an average of 7,000 synaptic connections each (primary source). The cerebral cortex has about 0.15 quadrillion synapses—or about a trillion synapses per cubic centimeter of cortex. More, the brain uses all of 20 watts of power to function fully. That works out to a vanishingly tiny amount of wattage per synapse (that’s 0 decimal point 12 zeros and a 2 at the end).

Intel’s latest AI-supportive chip suite (as of April 2024, anyway) supports up to 1.15 billion neurons and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores[.] That’s a bit over 110 “synapses” per “neuron.” The setup uses 2,600 watts at max function. That works out to 0 decimal point 7 zeros and a 2. Which is five orders of magnitude more power drain per “synapse” for the chip than for our brain.

Artificial Intelligence isn’t all that. It may well get there, but not tomorrow.

Social Services Fraud

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Minnesota’s social services fraud has been going on for years. Faye Bernstein used to work in Minnesota’s Department of Human Services as a compliance officer, but when she started identifying the level of fraud and the lack of controls with which to prevent the fraud and to address it when it did occur in 2019, she started being cut out, slandered, and ultimately forced out.

Since the situation has started getting ovetly addressed, nearly 100 people have been charged…. Two-thirds have been convicted so far in multiple interconnected schemes.

Most of those, though are soldiers, with maybe a made man or two thrown in as scapegoat distractions. It’s really necessary to go after the social services syndicate’s capos along with the capo di tutti i capi, which likely include Minnesota’s Progressive-Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and his syndicate concierge, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison. If those last two are, in fact, involved, and if they are brought down, two things would result: the Feds would know better how to identify and stop this sort of fraud and jail the perpetrators, and other States might start taking their social services responsibilities more seriously.

Bogus

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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.