Tag Archives: foreign policy

Still Just Love Taps

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In response to Iran’s “surprise” attacks on US forces in Jordan, the US answered with a powerful response.

US forces carried out a “heavy wave” of strikes, attacking dozens of targets, including military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, and maritime capabilities, said US Central Command after the strikes were completed. “The strikes aimed to further diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces, commercial shipping, and neighboring Gulf countries,” the command said.

And President Donald Trump (R):

We are going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn.

This is nothing but a few wholly inadequate love taps, though, to use Trump’s on phrase. His dislike for the killing and destruction war causes is well known, but here he’s letting it cloud his judgment.

The only way to diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces is to destroy those threats’ physical capability to act on their enmity. If we know where those targets, those command centers, missile and drone facilities,… are, we need to hit and destroy all of them, in rapid sequence if not simultaneously, not just bang some of them in onesies and twosies strikes. The terrorists must be completely disarmed, as many of their—now IRGC—leadership killed as we can reach, and the surviving leadership blinded by eliminating their command centers, surveillance facilities, military radar systems.

Worse from Trump’s perspective (were he to get better advice from his civilian advisors), the tit-for-tat that is this turn-taking foolishness only runs up, for the mid- and long-term, the casualty count and the physical destruction.

It’s time to be serious. Hit Iran with continuous waves of strikes strong enough actually to be worthy of being called “heavy.” Diplomacy can easily and straightforwardly be carried out while these strikes are ongoing rather than during pauses, which are strongly beneficial to the terrorists: safe passage to a meeting site can easily be granted and enforced for Iranian decision makers’ travel.

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.
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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.

Questions

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The subheadline on an article about Ukrainian attacks on retail warehouses in Russia raises a couple for me.

Infernos burned through massive warehouses operated by Wildberries, causing billions of dollars in damages

Some of those fires burned for a couple of days before they were brought under control.

Thus: are the Ukrainians using fire accelerants in their attacks on the warehouses (good for them if they are; they should be adding them to their attacks on the barbarian’s fuel and refinery facilities, too), or does Wildberries really have such poor fire fighting systems and such poor flammables storage protocols?

Quitters?

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American AI developers are all up in arms over the successes of People’s Republic of China AI models, especially those that are being released as open source. The American executives’ beef centers on how good those models are and how cheaply produced they are.

OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.

And

The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 also was competitive with US models on some benchmarks.
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“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,'” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday.

The general thrust of these bleats and cries to Mommy Government is that these personages think that the PRC’s scientists and programmers are smarter than American scientists and programmers, and they want to cower inside a truly dystopian regulatory moat that would stifle American innovation in AI altogether.

That’s as unacceptable as it is despicable. AI development—American AI development, especially—enormously benefits from open competition. Competition is what drives at an accelerating rate the quality of any product class, and especially AI. Especially AI, too, is a competition we must win—where winning isn’t across the finish line first, since with all product development, there is no finish line. Winning here means maintaining a significant (not just by a nose) lead.

Thus, American AI development must proceed apace, without regulatory restriction. We have enough laws on the books to handle its misuse, just as we have for any tool. American execs need to stop bleating and get competitive, on quality, on price, on rate of improvement.

The sole exception to largely unfettered competition should be AI models from companies domiciled in, or associated with companies domiciled in, the People’s Republic of China.

That exception, though, has nothing to do with those models’ costs or capabilities or open source availability or nearly anything else. This exception is driven solely by the national and corporate security threat those companies and their models represent. Those companies, via the PRC’s 2017 intelligence law, are entirely beholden to the PRC intelligence community for conducting espionage on any subject, in any venue, and against any potential source that the intelligence arm of the PRC government wishes. These companies should be barred from the US, and other nations wishing to remain free from PRC…influence…should do the same.

And this central truth: American scientists and programmers are every bit as good as, if not better than, PRC scientists and programmers. As are the scientists and programmers of other nations wishing to remain free.