PopSci Goes There

A quick web search shows I’ve been writing about the problematic future of Artificial Intelligence for at least 10 years. Instapundit links to a Popular Science article tying AI to the "Butlerian jihad." 

That is a term from Frank Herbert’s doorstop novel Dune. In that future history, at some point in our not-too-distant future we concluded that thinking machines were a threat to human existence and banned them entirely, the jihad referring to the Luddite rebellion this required.

If intelligence is what makes people special, and we develop machines with intelligence, how do they not have human rights? Does turning off the power become 'murder' or merely 'anesthesia?' And do they have a say in whether or not power can be turned off? 

We are wading out into an unexplored swamp and we have no idea if we can survive the AI experience, or even profit from it. 

Spring Has Sprung

I allowed the Spring Equinox to pass yesterday without notice, my apologies. Spring is officially here. A couple of days ago I switched the HVAC system from heat to cool, where it will remain until early November. 

Of course on the Mojave we've been in shirtsleeve weather for some weeks, while 500+ miles north at our Wyoming home it won't be really spring for another month. A lot of places have had a tough winter, our NV place is truly a haven from all that. 

Days are noticeably longer now, I can fire up the BBQ grill w/o turning on outside lights. We've seen outdoor temps in the low 90s already, very comfortable with no humidity.

Choosing “Poorly”

I am twice a graduate of San Jose State University (B.S., M.S.), both milestones passed many decades ago. I enjoyed my years there, I do not like seeing it get this kind of negative publicity. 

Apparently its current leadership has decided the risible “men in women’s athletics” issue is the hill they’ve elected to die on. In the fabled words of the ancient Templar, they “chose poorly” (classical reference) 

Sadly they won’t get the instantaneous comeuppance he witnessed in “the Valley of the Crescent Moon,” more’s the pity. I do like SecEd McMahon’s funding threat, and I will not contribute to the alumni fund.

Back to Nomadic Herding

Yesterday afternoon President Trump posted the following on X. As Ukraine discovered, power plants are in known locations and hard to defend.

If Iran doesn't FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Iran probably has backup generators for hospitals and key government buildings, if fuel can be provided. 

Without electric power civilization disappears and society reverts to prior norms. Water and sewage don't move, refrigeration ends, heat comes from fire, or sunlight, most homes become little more than artificial caves. Gas stations can't pump fuel, traffic lights don't work, etc. Phones and tablets can't be charged.

Imagine digging a pit privy in your yard, if you have a yard. Carrying water from God-knows-where, cooking over an open fire, and scrounging for light after sunset. Apartment dwellers can't even do this much.

Interestingly, the rural poor will probably be more able to cope than more fortunate urbanites. They are accustomed to living around dung piles and have animals to kill and eat.

Mowing Iran's Grass

It is being reported in various locations that Iran launched an attack on the joint U.K./U.S. base at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. They fired two intermediate range ballistic missiles at the base.

One failed in flight, another was attacked by an anti-air missile fired by a US Navy ship. Neither reached the target, which is 2400 miles from Iran. It was not previously known that Iran had operational weapons of this range.

Such weapons threaten many targets in Europe, Africa, and India. Combine these missiles with the crude nuke Iran could possibly cobble together and you've got a threat to much of the world. 

This certainly makes fools of those who claimed Iran was no threat. The threat is real, and it's in a region that produces martyrdom-seeking suicide bombers. Who's to say they won't try to revenge themselves on, for example, Rome and the Vatican, in addition to Tel Aviv?

You can't build ballistic missiles in a blacksmith shop. We need to keep bombing until their industrial capacity is destroyed. Instead of a ceasefire, we may need to go back periodically and "mow the grass*," - get rid of whatever they've rebuilt until they're ready to "play nice."

*An Israeli term of art for periodic attacks to keep an enemy weak, originally applied to Gaza.

Saturday Snark

IRBM attack on Diego Garcia leaves Kent looking dumb.

Dame Diana Rigg, of fond memory.

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Priorities

People are fond of writing and saying "Diversity is our strength." Voices raising doubts about that assertion are not often heard. I propose to raise the issue.

In a heterogeneous society like ours, certainly diversity is a strength, in that it enables most of us to feel included. I question whether it should be our only, or even our most important strength.

I argue that if we were to pick our key strength, it should be that group of things variously labeled skill, merit, excellence, or superior ability. If most people selected for a particular job come from one subgroup, because they are best able to get it done, that is more important than diversity.

Diversity would suggest NBA teams should be roughly 60% white, 20% Hispanic, and 12% black. That isn't the case, a majority of the most able players are black and the teams reflect that. 

Hispanics are seriously underrepresented in basketball, while overrepresented in MLB. When the job is staffing the most capable team, we become color-blind and look for superior ability. Why is that wrong in other occupations?

Let's say you're a middle aged guy, slightly overweight with a sedentary occupation. You stand a good chance of needing open heart surgery sometime in the next decade or two. 

How excited are you to learn that today's medical schools are all about "diversity is our strength?" Believe it, they are. I find that a scary thought, perhaps you do as well. Wouldn't you rather med schools were ruthlessly meritocratic? I would. 

An argument can be made that diversity programs actually foster discrimination against graduates from groups known to be favored. The programs raise suspicions about their qualifications that wouldn't occur if discrimination in their favor was not government policy.

Trumpian Humor

Our President has a robust sense of humor, and a sharp tongue. The Daily Wire reports the following interaction.

A Japanese reporter asked President Trump,

Why didn't you tell us before you struck Iran?

President Trump replied,

Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?

Ouch! I'll bet that smarted.

Seeking Consequential Outcomes

I call your attention to a good column in the New York Post by Martin Gurri, a former CIA official who is not even a little anti-Trump. Gurri begins thus:

At the start of his second term, President Trump surveyed the slowly rotting swamp that was the post-Cold War landscape, and he did not like what he saw. 

He has determined to scour it clean of dangerous attachments, conditions, and — as we now know — regimes the president considers to be a legacy of past American weakness.

His ultimate objective? A world open for business that realistically reflects the preponderance of American economic and military power. 

Gurri follows with an itemization of the feckless responses of our supposed major allies. He concludes this way:

The decline of the democracies, no matter how artfully camouflaged, has brought about the opposite of peace. Cowardice and weakness are a poor place to search for rules. Entropy isn’t order.

And like it or not, for good or harm, Trump will bestride the world over the next three years seeking high-risk but consequential outcomes rather than polite fictions.

Hat tip to Sasha Stone for the link, she liked it as do I. 

Most: College No Longer Worth High Cost

Here comes a new poll by Issues & Insights. It finds that the public has soured on college education as the universal panacea for career success in our difficult environment, a role it has held since the late 1940s. They report:

The national online poll, taken Feb. 24 to Feb. 27, asked 1,456 adults: “Do you believe a four-year college degree is worth the cost for most Americans today, or not?”

The answer indicates serious erosion in how Americans view the value of higher education. Overall, of those responding, 59% selected “Not worth the cost,” while just 24% picked “Worth the cost.” Another 16% weren’t sure. The poll has a +/-3.0 percentage-point margin of error.

(By comparison, as recently as 2013, a Gallup Poll found that 70% of Americans believed college was worth the price.)

I'm thinking higher education has finally jumped the shark. It has gotten so expensive, so ideologically driven, and so impractical that its former luster is gone.

On a personal note, the DrsC were fortunate to hit the higher ed "sweet spot" of post-war growth and boom times. Also fortunate to retire before the momentum faded and the emphasis on merit was lost. 

We can take credit only for recognizing opportunity when it showed up, and jumping aboard. Most of the decline has occurred since we retired - which we did just a skosh early.

L'Affare Kent

You may have read of the resignation-in-protest of Joe Kent, an administration counter-intelligence official. He announced it was in protest of the war in Iran, he claims Iran is no threat.

Fox News' Aishah Hasnie reports:

A senior administration official tells FOX, Joe Kent was:

-a known leaker and he was cut out of POTUS intelligence briefings months ago.
-the WH told DNI Tulsi Gabbard he should be fired for suspected leaks but she never did.
-he has not been part of any Iran planning discussions or briefings at all.

"He said, she said," who knows who is right?  Both sides have reason to lie, and probably are.

----------

My view of Iran's threat: If a person (or nation) says he wants to kill you, and is seen working to attain the means to do so, believe him and act accordingly. This we and the Israelis have done. 

Iran's Death to the Great and Little Satans merits our Death to Iran, or at least to those leaders claiming to act on Iran's behalf and to the infrastructure supporting their efforts.

Iran spent 47 years threatening us. Literally scores of other nations which have made no such threats tonight sleep peacefully in their beds. The lesson Iran needs to learn is clear, as voiced by James Brown:

Don't start none, won't be none.

Breaking ... Sorry, Broken

Stephen Green just posted at Instapundit a claim the Iranian embassy in Copenhagen has taken down the current Iran flag and raised the sun and lion flag of the Shah's regime. There is video but it is unclear and could be faked.

Is it vandalism, a defection, or the start of something bigger, like regime change? As another posted at that same site, the key will be to see if it happens elsewhere and how broadly the change shows up.

This could be a hoax, could be a defection, could be vandalism by anti-regime Irani emigrants, or it could be, as the song says, "the start of something big."

Something like this happened in London and the Brit police arrested the protestor who made the switch.

As the "orange man" likes to say, "We'll see what happens."

Later ... It turns out the old flag was raised by a protestor who was arrested by Danish police. 

Aside, as I typed "Danish police" I got a mental image of a uniformed dude guarding sweet rolls in a bakery. Our language is funny that way.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I write to wish COTTonLINE readers a happy St. Paddy's Day. Wear your green, avoid the green beer.

As I've probably mentioned before, my university decided spring break would always include St. Patrick's Day. They did this for a very good reason. 

Before this policy was instituted, with students on campus on March 17, the kids took it as a challenge to see how drunk they could get. If we had no deaths from alcohol poisoning, it wasn't from lack of trying.

Fearful of damage suits and bad publicity, the U concluded whatever students did when school wasn't in session wasn't their fault. There was going to be a weeklong spring break sometime anyway. Why not be sure that Get Drunk Day, as it became, occurred during spring break? And so it did.

My Scarpetta Review

We spent the last couple of nights binge watching the new Scarpetta on streaming. The other DrC has a good review of it on her website. 

I have a couple of things to add to what she wrote. I found the most interesting plot ‘gimmick’ was the nerd niece's dead wife brought back to life as an AI realtime onscreen voice and video presence. Her’s was by far the most charming role in the series, and very nearly its only sympathetic character. 

Everyone else was flawed enough to be off-putting, while all were competent-to-varying-degrees in their careers. I wonder if that is how Nicole Kidman experiences her off-screen life?

[Spoiler Alert] The series - nominally a whodunnit - violated one of that genre’s basic plot “rules.” It turned out the perp was someone whose only presence before the denouement was a one-line walk-on. There was no way for the viewer to have Holmes’ed it out.

I found the series shared a number of plotting flaws with Kidman’s earlier series, The Perfect Couple. My conclusion, she is a competent actress but I should avoid those of her future efforts in which she also has an off-camera role. These two examples of her notion of a good story left me irritated.

Iran's New Leader Gay?

The newly elected leader of Iran is Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former Ayatollah recently killed in a bomb blast. It has been reported in several places that he was repeatedly treated for impotence in England.

The New York Post reports that President Trump has been briefed that although married with children, Mojtaba is gay. That was why his father preferred someone else as his successor. The White House was quite amused by this gossip. 

If this was alleged of the leader of any first world country, it would be mildly interesting. That it is alleged of the leader of a country in which homosexuality is a death penalty offense is massively ironic. NYP has some details about this supposed condition dating back to Mojtaba's childhood. 

Comments about karma are irresistible. Also ironic that in neighboring Afghanistan sex with pretty boys is very common for wealthy clan leaders. The bacha practice grossed out GI officers who had to liaise with the Afghan clans.

Huntington Smiles

Writing for the California Post, the new west coast edition of the New York Post, James Gagliano notes a disturbing pattern in recent unpleasant incidents here at home. He cites the attempted bombing of anti-Iran protests in NYC, the murder of an ROTC prof in Virginia, and the ramming/shooting attack of a synagogue in Michigan.

Note the common thread: All these attackers were either naturalized citizens or their offspring.

We steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that the terror threat within our borders is stoked from the outside, inspired by those who hate us and wish us dead.

Make no mistake — this is asymmetric warfare, and Iran is not its only driver.

The sooner we recognize that radical Islam has been at war with the West for far longer than anyone reading this has been alive, the sooner we can begin to better confront this threat.

Ah, there it is in that last sentence, the recognition of the thing most want desperately to forget. It’s the Long War - Samuel Huntington’s 1992 Clash of Civilizations. 

We in the West want to forget but they won’t let us, as 9/11 should have reminded. Intermittently hot and cold, it either began with the Crusades or continued with them.

It lives in the founding documents of Islam, and periodically flares up, as now. My mental model for it is quasi-medical. Islam treats Western culture as an irritating foreign object. 

Periodically it generates ‘antibodies’ and ‘white blood cells’ like the IRGC, ISIS, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Houthis and Hezbollah to attack and destroy the irritant (us, non-Islam). ‘Infection’ or ‘allergic reaction’ results, we then call it “war,” they’ve always been clear about that name.

Christianity and Islam are both Abrahamic schisms. That they went in different directions is no surprise, the first was founded by a preacher, the second by a soldier. We seek coexistence, they seek “Death to the Great Satan.” It’s “love thy neighbor” vs. “convert or die.”

Volunteers vs. Draftees

President Trump is discovering something President Putin has learned. Wars one fights with volunteer troops do not cause the same intense reaction at home as wars fought with drafted soldiers. There is an implicit understanding that volunteering for the military puts the volunteer in lethal harm’s way. 

Russians are not as crabby about the war in Ukraine as they were about that in Afghanistan. Seeing this Putin has gone to extreme lengths - big signing bonuses, get out of jail ‘cards’, etc. - to send only volunteers to the fight in Ukraine. Relatively few of the casualties have been people from the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions, where ethnic Russians predominate.

At this point in our history all of our military personnel are volunteers. Presidents are permitted to put them in harms way insofar as it is done judiciously, with care, and most important - successfully. 

Our losses to date in Iran do not yet equal the lives lost to violence on an average long weekend in Chicago, about which we shrug.

Detention a Win-Win

An archived article from The New Yorker discusses the Trump administration’s policy of detaining in custody those illegal immigrants who are up for deportation. As you might guess, the author doesn’t approve of this Stephen Miller-directed policy change.

The model is elegant in its simplicity. Being in the US as an illegal immigrant is preferable to life in one’s home country, but being in a US jail is likely not preferable to being sent home. That the incarceration is unpleasant is a feature, not a defect.

That simple truth encourages many so held to accept voluntary deportation as a “get out of jail free” card. The legal hassle is obviated and the desired end state is achieved thereby.

The Mixed Blessing of Hate

If the search engine is accurate, COTTonLINE has never once cited the work of New York Times columnist David French, in nearly 20 years of observing our nation’s geopolitical scene. The likely reason is that we’ve mostly disagreed with his views.

Today we remedy that shortcoming, citing this archived column (not behind NYT paywall). He writes with sadness about the degree of polarization in our political life, finding abundant hate on both sides. He correctly identifies Trump as a result of this hate, not its cause - an insight not original to French but accurate nevertheless.

He identifies the problem, sketches its magnitude and notes its uniqueness with some skill. What he does not do is map a path away from our current “hate-arama” To be fair to him, I am not at all certain such a path exists. 

One of the sometimes embarrassing aspects of human nature is the energizing aspects of hating enemies, real and imagined. In our “red in tooth and claw” history, it helped us to become the landside apex predator of this planet, a distinction very much still accurate. Carried over into politics it is obviously a mixed blessing.

We tease this trait with sports and school rivalries, and these sometimes boil over into on-field riots. Hate provides a boost in war-fighting situations, with which our history is replete. Politically, it is very likely helped by the increasingly multicultural nature of our decreasingly acculturated populace.

We have to hope the checks and balances built into our system by our prescient founders are up to the task of holding the polity together. And, as often noted, “hope” isn’t much of a plan.