Coming Around?

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.

Press Dishonesty

This one is exposed by Just the News as it describes a blatantly slanted Reuters “news” article.

Reuters on Thursday published a photo article bemoaning the injuries to a teenager who was wounded when his father’s pager exploded during Israel’s targeted attack on Hezbollah terrorists.
In the article, titled Two years after Israel’s pager attacks in Lebanon, teenage survivor rebuilds his life, Reuters never mentioned why Israel conducted the attack, nor did it mention Hezbollah or terrorism once in any of the 15 pictures it used to garner sympathy for 14-year-old Lebanese Ali Abbas. In one photo, Reuters explained how Abbas received his injuries, saying only that “his father’s pager” detonated when young Abbas went to pick it up after it began “vibrating intensely,” according to his mother.

This is lying by omission, the most typical mechanism the journalism guild uses for its dishonesty. The omissions are centered on “editorial decisions” regarding what news to present and what not to present or to spike outright.

The Reuters piece can be read here.

A Brief Thought on Responsibility

In his WSJ piece centered on who, exactly, is responsible for AI mistakes—in the present context, AI functionalities “breaking out” and hacking other businesses—the news writer had this in his otherwise well worth the read article:

When you delegate to a person, your own burden can lighten, because part of your responsibility has gone elsewhere.

No, absolutely not. Responsibility is not a physical commodity that can be subdivided at will and to any extent desired. Responsibility cannot be delegated at all. The one doing the delegating—the one in charge of the program involved—retains all of his responsibility for the program and for the performance of every subordinate involved in the program, no matter how much authority he might have delegated.

Take careful note of that. What the delegator delegates is a measure of authority to carry out or to direct the carrying out of certain actions in pursuit of pushing the program forward. He is not delegating any responsibility at all; although he is assigning a measure of responsibility commensurate with the degree of authority he’s delegating. That responsibility he assigns, though, is de novo responsibility; it is not a portion of his own responsibility.

If responsibility were dilutable through delegation as the news writer suggested, it would be possible for the initially responsible person—the one in charge, perhaps—to dilute through delegation all of his original responsibility until he has none at all remaining, regardless of the good or bad performance (or intention) of any of the delegatees in the chain. How convenient that would be for a misbehaving or incompetent delegator.

Further, by retaining that which cannot be delegated, the delegator remains fully responsible for the performance of the delegatee to whom he has granted a measure of authority.

If He Won’t….

An essay writer in the WSJ pled, via his headline, For the Love of God, Please Put on Headphones.

One recent morning, I was reading the newspaper in a sleepy Manhattan cafe when two young women sat beside me and proceeded to conduct a work call on speakerphone. As they yelled to their colleague about a marketing presentation, a man at a nearby bench checked in with his girlfriend—also on speakerphone.
Into this racket walked an influencer type armed with a selfie stick. He was livestreaming his coffee run to an up-tempo backing track. “So excited for my cortado! I wonder how it will taste!” he shrieked at his screen as he spun around the room.

I doubt the essay writer wasn’t alone in the cafe trying to enjoy their morning when these noisemakers arrived and began their cacophony.

There’s a simple, straightforward solution for this sort of situation and for dealing with the noisemakers creating it.

Those in the public space should gather around him (them in the particular instance) closely, and make their own noise—loud conversations, loud calls of greetings to passersby, turn up the sound on their own playlists on their own cell phones—and strongly interfere with the loudcaster and the speakerphone shouters who think they’re too cool to put on headphones or, at least for the shouters to take their cell phones somewhere more secluded.

Separately, but not too far afield, I have to wonder about the last few generations, even into the boomers. Whatever happened to folks being willing to take direct action, to address a problem on their own initiative, instead of looking and crying out for someone else to Do Something, or crying to mommy government, or just crying into the air? Or screeding an essay into the æther?

Silly

To the point of idiotic. Yet, that’s the nature of the position of Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei. He has said that

he hoped Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when they meet later this month, could reach an agreement to ban the use of AI to develop biological weapons, an area of concern for researchers and national-security officials.

Yet he also said,

“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress. I think that’s going to be very difficult” because of the military incentives of moving AI forward[.]

Which demonstrates the idiocy of his “hope,” even though he’s oblivious to it. The People’s Republic of China has as its avowed goal replacing the United States as the world’s hegemon. It’s been rapidly expanding its military capability pursuant to that end.

Actually, the “hope” is beyond idiotic. It’s national suicide to depend on an enemy nation to honor an agreement to not use AI for weapons development. How would we enforce such an agreement? How would we even detect violations of the agreement before the outcome was used against us? AI, after all, isn’t a nuclear weapon whose testing is easily detected, and was easily detected even with the technologies of the 1950s. AI development and testing, when done by researchers who take security seriously (which Amodei’s and Sam Altman’s researchers evidently do not), is done behind firewalled and air gapped barriers. Aside from preventing AI from escaping, it also prevents outsiders from getting in to watch.