A.I. in war and peace

"Last week, as New Scientist reported that leading A.I. models kept recommending nuclear strikes during war-game exercises, the Department of War tried to strong-arm Anthropic, its leading A.I. vendor, into backing down from its demand that its tools not be used for domestic surveillance or totally autonomous warfare. In general, I’m not an A.I. doomer who thinks existential risk or even thoroughgoing social disruption is right around the corner. But these developments didn’t seem great.

"Then the Pentagon proceeded to launch an attack on Iran, reportedly with the help of Claude, even though President Trump had banned its use just hours before. It’s possible that one of the first targets was an elementary school in which at least 175 people were killed. (Neither Israel nor the United States has claimed responsibility for the strike.) ...

"... The major A.I. companies quickly grew so large and so important to the near future of the American economy that they began to seem not only too big to fail but perhaps so big that the government was scared to interfere with them. And now, partly in response, a genuinely democratic backlash is brewing ...  The country is hugely anxious about what’s to come while at the same time seeming to lack real faith in anyone, or in any institution, to actually manage it. One common analogue for artificial intelligence is nuclear weapons...."

David Wallace-Wells [gift article] argues that a combination of opportunity, nimbyism, and local targeting has channeled vehement popular opposition to unregulated A.I. into preventing build-out of massive data centers. 

"... A.I. arrives in that landscape like an all-encompassing symbol of people’s powerlessness, which is already here but is bound to grow worse, heralding a vision of the future in which much of the ordering of society has been handed over to robots operating in black boxes controlled by a small number of immensely wealthy people.

"Increasingly, voters seem to be trying to take things into their own hands, rising up in opposition to the intrusion of A.I. infrastructure into their local communities.... Younger voters especially hated the building of data centers ... an interesting inversion of the conventional pattern in which younger people are both more tech-friendly and less opposed to change than their parents. ..."

People can be roused and organized in opposition; A.I. is politically potent because what we know and what we are told echoes our felt fears.

"... I don’t know how it will address fears that a small group of tech oligarchs are working feverishly to design a future in which many of the rest of us might be rendered functionally obsolete. “The cultural and economic impact of A.I. is going to be the biggest issue in politics over the next decade,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in December, expressing what has become an even more common refrain in the couple of months since. “I think we have not a clue,” said [Senator Bernie] Sanders in announcing his data center [regulation] bill. “We are totally unprepared for what is coming,” he added, predicting “massive job loss” and widespread “cognitive decline.” ...

"... In the past three [years], we’ve gone from casual users freaking out about their first encounters with ChatGPT to the Pentagon staging industrial-strategy-level fights over whether fully autonomous A.I.s can be deployed in war zones without any human oversight. In the next three? Those exponential curves may not bring us to a new godhead, but the genie doesn’t exactly look like it’s going back in the bottle, either. And those hoping to play a more active role in shaping the future that it’s conjuring will probably have to do more than stop ground from being broken for a few new data centers. 

Technological progress can't be stopped, but can it be regulated. Maybe. 

I grew up in the shadow of the atom bomb, raised with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's requirement that school children become practiced in ducking under their desks should the great mass incineration seem immanent. (Really! Since nuclear proliferation is pretty much sure to recur in the law-free world we have slipped into in 2025, that anxiety is likely to reinvigorate.) And then, with the end of the Cold War, awareness of the nuclear threat became a second order terror, superseded by global pandemics and, for some, the immanent arrival of aliens, extraterrestrial or not.

Can human beings survive ourselves? We always have, though often at terrible cost in lives and suffering. The Orange Toddler's perfect little war should force all this onto the agenda of a free people. But will it? Do explore David Wallace-Wells' musings. He's smart, measured, and thought provoking. 

The last rational man

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has spent a lifetime being alternately denounced for choosing to be himself by converting from Catholicism to Islam while young -- and also being admired as one of the most exciting, skilled, and durable basketball greats ever. Meanwhile, he's gone about his business of trying to be a thoughtful and rational man in an irrational nation and world.

As he does about most doings of his country, he has opinions about Iran and the Orange Toddler's war:

... When you step back and look at the full arc of the Islamic Republic, a pattern emerges. This is a regime that has survived by manufacturing enemies abroad and crushing dissent at home. It has used religion as a shield and a weapon, not as a source of compassion or justice. It has turned a country with immense human and natural resources into a place where young people dream of leaving, where talent is exported and fear is imported into every home.

The cost, both to Iran and the United States, has been staggering. Americans have lost loved ones in bombings and wars shaped by Ayatollah’s hand. Iranians have lost children to bullets, prisons, and gallows. The region has been destabilized by proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Millions of refugees have been created by conflicts in which the Islamic Republic has played a central role. And inside Iran, generations have grown up under a government that treats their aspirations as threats.

Iran is an ancient civilization with poetry, music, science, and philosophy that have enriched humanity for centuries. The problem is not Iran; the problem is a regime that has hijacked Iran’s name and used it to justify violence and repression.

A world without the Islamic Republic as a governing system would be a world where American families wouldn’t have to learn the names of distant cities only because their sons and daughters died there in attacks planned in Tehran. It would be a Middle East where one of its largest, most educated populations could participate openly in building regional stability instead of being used as cannon fodder in ideological battles.

And yet, in spite of all that, the U.S. cannot be the country that begins wars, or even conflagrations. We cannot become the world’s attack dog. We cannot simply march into a sovereign nation and take out their leader or system of government. 

Have we done that in the past? Have we begun and even sustained conflicts without going through the proper channels, also known as congressional support?

Yes we have. And it has never, ever turned out well. ...

Kareem puts me in mind of The Last Rational Man, a poem by Margaret Atwood. 

Yet cry out against war we must. 

Pioneers remembered

Obituaries marking the passing of runner and entrepreneur Jeff Galloway reminded me again of how much I owe to the generation of accomplished athletes, who, in the 1970s, popularized road and trail running for the untalented masses. That includes me.

Galloway promoted a run-a-little, walk-a-little system for enabling us to complete races and distances we never might have imagined. I never took to his system, preferring to develop a long, slow, distance habit of running that enhanced my fitness. But people like Galloway and Dr. Joan Ullyot made it acceptable for we, the slow pokes, to stumble out there in a way that had been unimaginable before. Movement was no longer confined to "real" athletes; it was encouraged for everyone.

I observe the trend they started is still with us, because I see it outside my San Francisco front window. Before the pandemic, I was the very rare older person who ventured for a trot on the local Mission city streets, usually at dawn. Reduced traffic during the shutdown months brought out a new generation of runners; many are still continuing an urban running practice today.

For the last few years, infirmities have reduced me to long, slow walking using trekking poles, but I still keep up the regularity I long ago learned from the first running boom. Twenty to twenty-five miles a week, however slow and whether I like it or sometimes not. 

I remain grateful to the generation pioneering mass athletic participation of whom Galloway was an important leader!

Our Mad King ignites Iran and beyond

The key to understanding the Orange Toddler's excellent Persian adventure is to gaze at events from the appropriate distance. That distance is very far away for the noise and carnage. Don't be distracted by minutia -- minutia like a dead ayatollah, an obliterated girls school, a few crashing US planes. Looking closely and accurately doesn't inform; it merely confuses.

All there is to see here is death and destruction triggered by a stupid man trying to assuage his inadequacies and line his pockets.

Military and international relations scholar Phillips P. OBrien tells it as he sees it:

... Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US governments intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory.

He has made the national interest entirely personal.

... I cannot think of any other decision to start the use military force that comes close to the lack of support for these strikes. It might explain his desperation. Trump started this to have a win for him, but starting it as he has, he has made getting that win very difficult. It could lead him to get desperate.

... This is a president using the awesome power of the US military entirely for selfish reasons, killing Iranians and Americans to feed his own needs.

It is unlikely to end well.

We all, those still around, should be so lucky as to see it "end well," whatever that means. We live in the land of the Mad King who is also a whining Toddler.

It was pointed out a long time ago ...

 

There is no moral excuse for "a preventive war." The leaders of the Episcopal Church apparently understood that in 1952. This was the height of the Cold War during the national shock at learning that the US monopoly on nuclear weapons had not lasted forever, that the apparent  post-WWII US global hegemony faced a real competitor from the battle-hardened Russian Soviet Union. No excuse for preventive war in 1952. (This informative snippet flew by me by way of the Bishop of LA. John H. Taylor.)

 

No excuse now either, however awful the Mullahs have been for Iranians. Christian religious leaders today, mainline Protestant and Catholic, remind us of that. 

 

Trump has offered no plausible purpose or imaginable outcome for his war on Iran. The Washington Post reports that a combination of Saudi Arabia and Israel talked our gullible toddler into his Iran strikes. They point out: 

Now Trump will bear the risk of the bet he has placed: that a major military operation conducted from the air can achieve political goals on the ground. 

Retired General Mark Hertling knows a thing or two about wars. 

... The first night of a war is always the easiest night to make look clean.  ...  Degrading a regime’s capabilities is a military task; but replacing a regime, or trying to reshape its behavior through punishment from above, or compelling its people to rise up—those are strategic gambles that seem to rest on hope more than on a clearly articulated plan.

It is true that air campaigns can destroy things. What they cannot do, by themselves, is build political outcomes.

Pity the Iranians. Pity us all dragged into combat by foolish, greedy, vainglorious leaders. 

Once again a tin-pot quasi-dictator makes war

Pity the unhappy people of Iran, involuntary extras in evil men's fantasy theatrics. Or maybe I should say who are the target of an unconstrained little boy who likes blowing things up. 

Diana Butler Bass has re-upped a sermon from that uppity Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan from the beginning of George W. Bush's excellent adventure in Iraq. We know how that turned out ...

Our country is at war. One of the beatitudes, “Blessed are the makers of peace,” touches closely on our situation, which hovers between predicament and holy opportunity.

What indeed can it mean in such days as we endure, to be ‘peacemakers’? Not ‘just war’ theorists, not ‘pacifists,’ not, surely not war makers. But ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ ‘the makers of peace.’

The term in the original Greek, is disturbingly concrete, physical. One makes peace in somewhat the way one makes a table or a building, a school or a hospital, something useful or beautiful or both. We make peace in somewhat the way two people make a child. Makers of peace. The task is untidy, unfinished, laborious, always to be started anew....

There are always more idiots who think they can blow things up without consequence -- and without regard for dead children. And the task of a decent people is always the same: to make peace, not wars.

Two days ago, the historian Timothy Snyder offered his two most likely rationales for Trump's excellent little Persian war. He sees: 

... two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.

From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies....

At home, we know Trump's approval is cratering, so no wonder he needs a war. 

[From afar] ... who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.

The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?

It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis. ...

The sheiks who pay the bribes to the Trump family are getting what they want. Most certainly, Bibi Netanyahu is getting what he wants from his dopey friends.

Let's hope this war stay "little." People far more knowledgeable than I doubt that "limited" war in the region is possible ... 

Speak its name!

That's right. A headline a former Buffalonian can love:

I don't miss winter. But this San Franciscan sure understands. 

Once upon a time in the midst of Iraq War II, citizens of this city tried to name our new brand new sewage treatment plant for George W. Bush. Cooler heads prevailed, alas ...

U.S. Olympians get to be real Americans

And our Orange Toddler of a president, doesn't like that.

Some days the only bit of day to day media coverage I can stomach are the offerings from the sports writers. The San Francisco Chronicle's Ann Killion brings smarts and empathy to reporting on the antics of our Winter Olympians. She argues "why none of us should 'stick to sports.'"

That was a rough couple of weeks for the “Stick to Sports” folks, who — at best — always sound a bit naive about how the sports world works, as though athletic endeavors happen in a remote silo off in the distance and are not a reflection of society at large.

The wildly popular Milan Cortina Winter Olympics — the highest rated in 12 years — were a perfect illustration of how sports always has and always will intersect with society and the issues of the times.

...As the [U.S.A. hockey team] men celebrated their stunning overtime win over Canada and FBI Director Kash Patel — already under fire for using an FBI plane for personal travels at taxpayer expense — chugged beer and acted like he had scored the winning goal, a congratulatory call came in from the president of the United States. Not unusual. 

What was unusual was that Donald Trump, after inviting the men to the State of the Union address and the White House, took the moment to be divisive and belittling to other American gold medalists: “And we have to — I must tell you — we’re going to have to bring the women’s team. If I don’t do that I probably would be impeached.”

Click to enlarge.

The women’s team also won gold, also beating Canada, on Thursday. For some reason, they did not receive a congratulatory phone call from the president of the United States. Citing scheduling — the players finished the Olympics last week and are back to the PWHL and college this week — they politely declined Trump’s half-baked invitation.

... The disdain for women’s sports, the lack of care over the hard work put in and the ongoing discrimination that females athletes face is real, and it was on full display in that phone call. 

Killion reminds that these are very young people, obviously committed to and engulfed by the demands of being the very best at their sports.

The U.S. men took a rash of grief for laughing at the president’s remark. I give them some grace because they were jacked up on adrenaline and beer and most Americans have been trained to smile at powerful men’s awkward, cringey attempts at humor. In truth you can hear one player clearly say “Absolutely” that the women should be invited and a few others call out “Two for two.” The two programs are close and generally supportive of one another.

... During the Games, American athletes were asked questions about things happening in their country and answered honestly and were attacked for those answers. Trump called one young American athlete, freestyle skier Hunter Hess, “a real loser.” Athletes from Minnesota and elsewhere felt strongly about what they were seeing on the streets of American cities and spoke their minds, and they were condemned for doing so.

... [Richmond, California's Alysa] Liu, whose father fled China in 1989 after participating in the student protests in Tiananmen Square, found herself being embraced by the conservative right in recent days, and the phrase “Be an Alysa Liu” caught fire on social media.

That’s a bit of a funny spot for the “alt” kid from the East Bay who defies convention and other people’s opinions. At the same time that “Be an Alysa Liu” was trending, also going viral was an interview with Liu, who said: “I think it is really important to notice the faults in our own government. Things are a little rough. There’s so many protests that are going on and I’ve attended. Coming from a family of immigrants, I think immigrants deserve rights.” ...

After all, these young folks are Americans. Since we are by and large untutored in their sports, the focus they attract redounds on us as well as on them. Our cheers for them are not only for their individual wizardry, but also because they demonstrate the country can produce skill and flair in arenas where most of us could never win entry. And that's good thing for them and for the country. 

... The athletes who wear the flag have grandparents or great-grandparents who fought fascism.They have parents who fled repressive regimes that allowed no freedom of speech or a right to protest. They know they have the right to speak their mind, to make their own choices, to stand up for what they believe is just, to demand respectful treatment, to insist on equality. 

If all this honesty and self-reflection makes the U.S. Olympic team “Team Woke,” a lot of us are here for it. And it’s just more proof that there’s no “sticking to sports.” Sports and social issues can’t be separated. 

Jesse Jackson remembered

It poured and poured cold rain as the crowd waited for the Presidential candidate. And then he finally showed up, hours late. Based on the response of the waiting people, it had all been worth the pain.

The last rally of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1988 run for the Democratic  presidential nomination took place in San Francisco's Castro District in front of the AIDS Hospice called Coming Home. We knew Jackson wasn't going to win the big prize -- this had become obvious weeks previously, though he kept winning more of the vote than orthodox commentators expected. 

That spring, wearing a Jackson button had brought knowing smiles from strangers on the street. It felt as if one had joined a secret society. He did come in first in the San Francisco vote; Michael Dukakis did not inspire.

But we all knew that last rally was an end of one phase of struggle. (Struggle never ends, after all.)

And somebody had to do the physical advance work for the event -- set up volunteers, place barricades, ensure traffic flow, alerts to neighbors about parking, etc., etc. etc. Somehow Erudite Partner and I ended up the site coordinators tasked with making sure all that worked. And that's a tale.

Because it was already obvious that the Jackson campaign was not going to lead to political jobs or perhaps anywhere, the infighting between various little lefty sects who had glommed on to the campaign only became more acute in the last days. They all wanted a piece. They generated position papers. Their idea of political heft was to ensure that their slogans or banners were front and center; not for them the question of how many and where there should be porta potties!

However at least one or two of this fractious bunch who had constituted themselves the local Jackson campaign knew that somebody was going to have to do the menial work of making the rally actually happen -- so they did something smart: they deputized a couple of lesbians (not left-sectarian affiliated, I should mention). There we were, a week before the event, drawing site plans and wondering where we could get enough folding chairs for VIPs in attendance. 

We rapidly ran into an unexpected obstacle. Reverend Jackson was a legit presidential candidate, so he came with Secret Service protection. As site coordinators, we had to be vetted. And we'd just returned from a trip to Castro's Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, back in the day when that was at least somewhat radical. We wondered ... but by this time in the Jackson campaign, the Secret Service had gotten used to non-standard resumes among campaign workers. And they were very competent and professional to work with; they were not going to let anyone kill Reverend Jackson!

Click to enlarge.

And so, we prepped as best we could and finally the big day came. A crowd of perhaps 1000 gathered in Collingwood Street, behind our barricade. Reverend Jackson had broken with the entire political establishment by speaking compassionately about AIDS/HIV. The LGBT+ community was coming out of six years in which science and medicine had no answer for "the gay plague." Hundreds sickened and died; no one really knew why for years. Far too much of straight society thought queers had brought this on themselves. Ronald Reagan, to his eternal shame, wouldn't speak the disease's name when his friend Rock Hudson succumbed in 1985. Eventually the disease got a name, but the first palliative drug, AZT, only became available in March 1988. 

Only such a traumatized community would have thought to hold a political rally outside a hospice where their people were dying.

On the day, it rained some more. As is typical of political candidates, Reverend Jackson was hours late. When he finally arrived, he was rushed inside to meet patients and those local pols who had enough pull to get away from the rain. Outside, the crowd waited. Then, finally, he came out the front door.

My friend Kathleen Duffy who served as the sign-language interpreter that day has been kind enough to share the San Francisco Chronicle's photo of Jackson's gesture to the crowd. His very appearance at such a place and time spoke his message to all those who found themselves involuntary outsiders to their own country: "Keep hope alive!" 

The crowd roared. Jackson caught the wave of emotion. And then he did exactly what the Secret Service had hoped to prevent. He charged down the stairs of Coming Home, started gripping hands along the barricade -- and then threw his 6'3" body over the low fence and plunged into the crowd, grasping hands and giving hugs.

The Secret Service patiently pulled him back; the people screamed. 

The queers had been seen. And given their hearts ...

When it was all over, we made sure the porta potties were returned. 

Yet another atrocity of the regime

They keep thinking of further ways to punish people violating, or existing, outside their picture of what America means. I had not thought of this one -- but of course...

Jill Filipovic reports: 

As part of its strategy of arresting and warehousing immigrants in abhorrent conditions which are leading to illness and even death, the Trump administration is grabbing up pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children from across the country and shipping them off to Texas so that they can’t get safe and legal abortions — and where they also don’t get adequate medical care.

This is an administration rule: If an undocumented child is pregnant, she goes to a single South Texas shelter in San Benito, where abortion is outlawed and where she will be hours away from the large hospitals that have the kind of specialized obstetric care that pregnant girls need. The girls are being sent to Texas specifically because Texas bans abortion, and moving them there means that they won’t be able to end their pregnancies. 

There are reportedly more than a dozen pregnant girls currently being held at this center. Before this policy was put into place, pregnant children who were in the US illegally and without a guardian would be sent to trained foster families or specialized facilities; not anymore. The directive came from Angie Salazar, the director of refugee resettlement, but was pulled directly from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan. ...

Filipovic -- rightly I think -- characterizes what is happening here as rape, the state repeating what has already been done to these children.

... after having control over every aspect of their lives stripped away, from where they live to what has happened to them sexually, the Trump administration is committing what I would qualify as tantamount to a second rape: Saying, just like a rapist does, your body is not yours, and I will do with it what I want.  

The girls' story escaped into the mainstream because even employees of the Office of Refuge Resettlement under the Trump administration understood they were being part of something very wrong. The plan to ship pregnant migrants of any age to Texas where abortion is outlawed was part of Project 2025. 

Any atrocity to ensure women have no control over our bodies ...