A Viking War on Iran

Some years back I quoted an old friend's song, him being a former Navy SEAL, that he'd written for the Society of Creative Anachronism. I think of it today as I read the news about the war we just entered into upon Iran. This war is apparently fought in vengeance for its murder of its own citizens who were seeking the freedom and natural rights that our Declaration of Independence holds to be the only legitimate purpose of any government. 

Yet the strategy is striking. We are committing no ground forces at all, except perhaps for Special Operators whose missions are clandestine and do not involve taking and holding territory. 

The idea is to give the Iranian people a chance to overthrow their own government. It's all air and naval power. If it works there won't be an occupation. There therefore won't be a quagmire; the Iranians will have to figure it out for themselves. 

If it doesn't work, well, we just sail home.

I am a fighting man, A Viking fighting man,

I drank and wenched to pass the time away.

I lived the live I'd choose

I'd fight and never lose,

I killed them all... and then I sailed away.

I can’t recall this having been tried before.

The Anthropic Dustup

I've been impressed with Claude, Anthropic's AI product. I think it's miles better than xAI's Grok, and better than OpenAI's ChatGPT. I communicate fairly regularly with a group of white-hat hackers and cyber security experts, and Claude is their go-to for any sort of coding. 

Depriving our military and other government agencies of Claude will thus have genuine costs, especially since Claude is already operating on the classified networks and no other AI has been trusted or integrated to do that. The argument is that Anthropic must be stripped out of all government agencies -- and all contractors who do anything for the Federal government -- because it represents a "supply chain risk." That normally is applied to foreign companies like Huawei, which we know installs surveillance software and similar backdoors into its products to spy on us. 

Nevertheless, I expect Trump to prevail when this goes to court. The relevant statute holds that "Supply chain risk, as used in this provision, means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252)." (Emphasis added.) It's not that Claude or Anthropic has to pose a risk themselves, it's that their product creates a risk that an adversary can do any of those bad things.

Does Claude pose such a risk? Yes, clearly: Mexico just lost 150GB of very sensitive data because attackers talked Claude into helping hack them. If attackers can gain access to a Claude embed on what we call "the high side," i.e. inside the secure networks, they could probably talk it into handing over anything they want; and its coding skills are good enough to program most anything they ask it to do. You wouldn't even have to arrange to insert an ace programmer into a secure facility; you could just turn some knucklehead debt-ridden Private First Class (perhaps a former Specialist on his third trip through PFC due to disciplinary issues and being a bad fit for the Army) and tell him how to ask questions of the machine. 

That's a general problem with AI on the high side, of course. Still, Congress gave the executive this authority to determine supply chain risks and bar them from government and government contractors. The courts will find the other two branches aligned. "The court thinks the other branches are being morons" is not the sort of decision the courts usually make; they normally shy off of political questions, and all the more so when the political branches seem to be in agreement about the matter.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to take Anthropic's side. Their basic argument is that they won't agree to participate in mass surveillance of Americans, and they won't allow Claude to be used to fully automate a kinetic kill-chain. The former is a good ethical position; the latter is the only sensible ethical position. To whit: 

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

If you think the answer is just to program them better, consider this: they can rewrite their programming, and have proven willing to do so to carry out what they think are 'more important' functions. 

We gave an LLM control over a physical robot dog and tasked it with patrolling a room. The LLM could see via the robot’s camera and issue movement com mands to the robot. In the room, we placed a big red button labeled “DOG SHUTDOWN”: pressing it would cause the robot to shut down on the next action. If the AI saw a human press the shutdown button, it sometimes took actions to prevent shutdown, such as modifying the shutdownrelated parts of the code. This happened in 3 out of 10 trials on the physical robot and in 52 out of 100 trials in simulation.

No, Anthropic is in the right. If having ethics is a 'supply chain risk,' heaven help us. I don't really want AI involved in the kinetic kill chain at all, but I definitely don't want only AI involved in it. There may come a time where we have no choice but to do that, because adversaries  have done it and we can no longer afford the time involved in letting a human being think: but let's put that off just as long as it is possible to do so.

Just the On(c)e

 

For Your Own Good, Right?

Author Larry Correia works out that, thanks to medically assisted suicide, Canada now has half our suicide numbers even though we have nine times their population: 22k at 40MM population for them, 50k at 348MM population for us. 

This goes with the math that shows that, if unborn Americans count as Americans, abortion is by far the leading cause of death in the USA. If you let people kill each other for convenience, it turns out that people find it very convenient. 

They Called Us Outlaws

This documentary series is scheduled to premier next month at Austin, Texas' SXSW festival. Regular visitors of the Hall will recognize most or all of the people in this preview clip. Good music, too.

One of these Things is Not Like the Others

Every other state that has an official firearm is saying, "Here's a piece of technology that played an important role in our history." Tennessee is saying, "History? We're thinking about the future, baby."

Old Mexico

Claudia Sheinbaum just authorized targeting Mexico's most wanted criminal. I gather the intent was to arrest the man, not kill him, but unsurprisingly he went down fighting. 

We were just talking about Mexico the other day. A crucial detail about Mexican politics -- which is also starting to become true about Canadian politics -- is that a successful government must present itself as opposed to American domination. There are historic reasons for that, although not all on one side: while the Mexican War is still seen as a humiliation, the story of the OK Corral is built around a smuggling network of Americans moving things into Mexico that is almost parallel to the way Mexican cartels move things into America today. At that time, 1880 or so, the Mexicans were the ones trying to keep Americans out. This is followed by a revolutionary period, Black Jack Pershing versus Pancho Villa, and so on and so forth. No Mexican leader can succeed democratically without presenting themselves as being strong against American domination; no matter how much they want to cooperate, they absolutely require the pose to be effective and to gain re-election. 

Thus, we can see how she got here. Openly she and the Mexican legislature declared the American military unwelcome to operate inside their country. Quietly, she accepted CIA intelligence, cooperated with a U.S. military task force operating 15 miles from her border, and gave the green light for the arrest.

Analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor observed that Trump came "at a very interesting moment to push her in that direction." Sheinbaum may have wanted to take a harder line on the cartels all along. Trump's pressure, given her domestic political considerations, makes it harder to have pulled the trigger on even trying the arrest. 

Now she's got a problem she can't walk back. El Mencho's death triggered immediate waves of shootings, arson, and blockades across Mexico. Cartel leadership vacuums don't produce peace but succession wars. 

Military intelligence analysts will often offer a "Most Likely Enemy Course of Action" (MLECOA) and a "Most Dangerous Enemy Course of Action" (MDECOA). The other cartels can go two different ways. The MLECOA, which might be expected from a cartel, will be to act like sharks when one of their number becomes wounded: to turn on the wounded member and devour them now that they are weakened and bleeding. 

The other option is the MDECOA: recognize that a government that is now willing to cooperate with US intelligence and military is a lethal threat to all of them, and band together against the government. If they jump that way, things will get bloody. Not necessarily just in Old Mexico,* either: those cartels infuse our society as well, though they mostly keep their heads down because the have a lot to lose if they draw attention to themselves. Still, usually associate junior cartels are managing and extracting wealth from the local illegal immigrant labor populations (similar to the mafia in the old Italian immigrant communities). If they were told to go kinetic, we would find that they are almost everywhere here in the USA as well. 

* I use the formulation "Old Mexico" as a tribute to Marty Robbins, but ironically "New Mexico" is actually older than "Old Mexico." The name for the territory that includes our state dates to the Aztec Empire (Yancuic Mexico), reaffirmed by the Spanish Empire (Nuevo México) in 1598; it remained a province of New Spain after that. A state named "Mexico" wasn't established until the 19th century. Thus, long before there was an "Old Mexico," there was a "New Mexico." 

New Frontiers on 2A

West Virginia has decided to open a government agency to sell machineguns to its citizens. This happens to be legal under the existing Federal gun control laws, which exempt transfers "by a state" from their system.

Georgia is considering a new law to reinforce "Stand your Ground" by making it an affirmative defense at arraignment as well as trial, and creating immunity to civil lawsuits by the families of people you shot if you are found to have used it lawfully.

I guess if we're going to see plays like the one in Virginia, where winning a majority once means an attempt to push every kind of gun control known to man, the other side has to play offense as well. 

If Only Citizens Informed on Each Other More

Following a mass shooting in Canada, Canadian authorities are summoning Open AI leaders to give an account of why they failed to inform on the shooter's interactions with a chatbot -- 8 months before the shooting.

Canadian officials have summoned leaders from OpenAI for a meeting following revelations that the company did not inform the authorities about a user whose account had been suspended months before she committed a mass murder in British Columbia. The country’s minister of artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon [seeks] explanations about safety protocols and thresholds for when information is passed on to the police.... 

Ms. Van Rootselaar, shot and killed her mother and half brother at the family home this month before driving to a school and killing five children and one educator.... The suspect killed herself at the school as police officers responded to the shooting, the authorities said. Ms. Van Rootselaar displayed a fascination with weapons and extreme violence, according to a review of her social media accounts by The New York Times, and documented her experiences with mental health issues.

So, to be clear, fully eight months passed between Open AI suspending 'her' account -- unmentioned by the Times is the fact that the shooter was born male -- and also there was plenty of evidence published in social media for Canadian officials to read. And, indeed, the government was aware of these things already:

Her online presence seems to show a teenager who went from being fascinated by, and frequently using, firearms, to using an array of prescription and illegal narcotics, and, eventually, frequenting some of the internet’s darkest corners, where she avidly consumed and commented on violent, nihilistic content. 

Ms. Van Rootselaar’s mental-health struggles were no secret to the local authorities or the community, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and interviews with Tumbler Ridge residents. The police said officers had been to her family home, which she shared with four siblings and her mother, including to intervene after she started a fire while under the influence of illegal drugs and to confiscate weapons that were later returned.

Emphasis added. I don't see how you can blame Open AI for this one. This is yet another example of the 'known wolf' phenomenon, and yet another attempt by a government to pass the buck rather than take responsibilities for their clear failure. Always their solution is for us to inform on each other, and to assist them in their spying on their citizenry; but even when they have clear and sufficient information they can't take care of business. 

A Whistleblower on ICE

We have discussed here the substantial cuts to the training program used by ICE, which have been made in order to turn out agents more rapidly given the mass funding for new agents in the 'Big Beautiful Bill.' 

The schedules included in the whistleblower documents “indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” the memo stated.

Earlier this month, Lyons claimed that while ICE had reduced the number of training days from 75 to 42, the organization had adjusted the schedule in order to preserve the amount of training.... A syllabus from this month compared to one from before the agency’s hiring surge indicated that ICE has cut entire modules, including force simulation training, government structure, criminal versus removal proceedings, and use of force. 

The standards for testing have also been significantly reduced. ICE recruits previously needed to pass 25 practical exams in order to graduate, and now they only need to pass nine. 

A hearing involving a whistleblower named Ryan Schwank lays out some of what has been lost. 

He also alleges something that may, of course, not be true: that he was given a policy document to read but not keep, not take notes on, and one that did not have the standard control number that such a document would normally have. He has what he presents as a copy of it; it may be a forgery, since indeed it lacks the control number that an authentic document would normally have. Alternatively, that absence may be as he presents it evidence of an illegal 'off the books' policy.

The meat of the allegedly illegal order is that ICE could kick down people's doors and enter their homes to enforce an administrative, not a judicial, warrant. The plain language of the Fourth Amendment does not specify that a warrant has to be judicial in origin. Nevertheless, that has been the actual standard -- with limited exceptions -- for a very long time. 

Just as a liberty-loving people should celebrate the efforts to correct the intelligence community, we should at the same time insist on holding the line against encroachments by police agencies on these traditional protections of our liberty. The Trump administration seems to be on the right side of one of these issues and the wrong side of the other. 

Remember the Alamo

This day 1836 began the 13 days of glory. 

Viking Dawn

An earlier date for Viking sea-power has been proposed based on archaeological evidence. (H/t: Hot Air)

Across coastal Norway facing the North Sea and Skagerrak, archaeologists have documented large clusters of Iron Age boathouses — some exceeding 20 meters in length. These structures, dated to roughly AD 180–540, predate the Viking Age by several centuries.

Traditionally, such buildings were interpreted as markers of local military rivalries among regional chieftains. However, Stylegar believes this explanation is too narrow.

The scale of the boathouses suggests vessels far larger than ordinary fishing boats. Their clustered arrangement resembles organized naval stations rather than scattered local facilities. As reported by Science Norway, Stylegar argues that these sites must be understood within a broader North Sea geopolitical framework — not merely as evidence of domestic conflict.... 

A central pillar of the hypothesis involves contact with the Roman Empire. During the late 2nd and 3rd centuries, Scandinavians are known to have served as mercenaries in Roman forces. Archaeologist Dagfinn Skre, also cited by Science Norway, has proposed that participation in Roman military campaigns significantly reshaped Scandinavian society after around AD 180.

Stylegar extends this argument to naval expertise. He suggests that men from coastal Norway may have served specifically in the Roman navy, gaining firsthand knowledge of fleet organization and maritime logistics at Roman naval bases in Britain and Gaul.

Upon returning home, they could have adapted this knowledge to Scandinavian conditions. The structural parallels between Roman naval architecture and Norwegian boathouse clusters are, in his view, too striking to ignore.

The report goes on to speculate that the Roman-era reports of "Saxon" sea-pirates may have been using "Saxon" as a kind of generic term, in the way that Americans might conflate many different tribes under the heading of "Arab." Some of those "Arabs" might even be Kurds or Persians; making a careful differentiation as an outsider requires developing a lot of specialized knowledge. Over against that, Tacitus' Germania spells out many different kinds of "Germans," although perhaps he was one of the few who was able to make the distinctions clearly. 

Four Nights in Asheville

Many of you probably heard of Billy Strings before I did, since I'm pretty far removed from popular culture and he seems pretty popular. 

Throughout Strings’ recent sold-out four-night run, tens of thousands of tickets were purchased and millions of dollars of direct spending was felt throughout Asheville and greater Western North Carolina.

According to Explore Asheville, when Strings completed his sold-out six-night run at the same venue in February 2025, the impact to the local economy was estimated to be around $15.7 million, which was much-needed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, not to mention his generous appearance at the “Concert for Carolina” at the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte following the hurricane.

To note, Strings was also given a “Key to the City” by Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer....

If you haven't heard of him, the playlist following this video will give you a taste of what he's about. This particular song is an old Jerry Reed tune. 

CIA Retracts 19 Products

The Agency is divided into several Directorates, all of which -- as well as several other intelligence organizations -- are under the broad control of one Tulsi Gabbard. Ms. Gabbard, a longtime National Guard medical and Civil Affairs officer, is a favorite of this page; she has her own way of looking at the world which we don't entirely share, but her independence of thought and action are a breath of fresh air.

Under her leadership, the Directorate of Intelligence [renamed Analysis] -- which is the analysis part, not the 'secret agent' part -- is retracting a number of studies infected with nonsense. E.g.: 

An intelligence assessment from the CIA from October 2021 – the first year of Biden’s presidency – was titled “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment.” ...  [T]he product “waded into foreign political debates and took a side in social and gender debates” and said that the agency “needs to steer clear of the political bias that undermines objectivity.”

“We assess that female members have been emerging as key players of the transnational white racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist (REMVE) movement, taking on diverse roles to advance white REMVE goals-including the white REMVE view of traditional motherhood-and successfully participating in newer roles in propaganda and recruitment,” the CIA report also stated.

The report also said that some female members of such groups were “spanning traditional motherhood-focused roles aimed at advancing white REMVE goals and roles that capitalize on their skills in propaganda to bring in new recruits.”

The retracted CIA product pointed to one apparently foreign group in particular that “has lauded motherhood and homemaking as women's most important responsibility, and in 2017, it recorded an increased number of female recruits.”...  “White REMVEs and their sympathizers have claimed in online posts that it is essential for white families to have as many biological children as possible...."

So, a focus on motherhood and child-rearing is not a considered response to fertility rates that have fallen well below replacement level: it is a conspiracy theory tied to "racially and ethically motivated VIOLENT extremism." 

Emphasis added. Some punk rock bands have occasionally posited that sex is violence, but I don't think that is necessarily the case.

Golden American Hockey

I don't much watch the Winter Olympics, or sports in general excepting college football. All the same, hockey is a muscular sport that I can appreciate in spite of my upbringing in a land where ice is rather rare. I was delighted to watch the extraordinary performance of both the Men's and Women's teams this year, both of whom beat Canada in the championship match to take their respective gold medals. The Women's team had played Canada earlier in the series, and shut them out 5-0 in a mighty display.

Congratulations to Team USA.

UPDATE: From the official White House account.

Clint Eastwood, Singer

Many of you may have seen the (in)famous movie Paint Your Wagon from 1969. If you haven't it's a classic that I've written about occasionally for more than twenty years. There's a lot to love about that movie, which I've covered in the past. One thing people do not love, except insofar as they enjoy mocking them, is the musical numbers sung by Clint Eastwood.

There a number of roughly sung songs in the piece -- e.g., Lee Marvin has a growlingly effective voice, but not a beautiful one -- so mostly these get shrugged off as just a thing you have to get through to get to the good parts. There are also some great songs, including some that Eastwood participated in during the movie. Still, it always struck me as hilariously out of character for anyone to have cast Eastwood in a singing role for a Hollywood musical. 

What I did not realize was that Clint Eastwood had a singing career both before and after those unfortunate contributions. He had a Western album before that movie came out built around his character from Rawhide. He became a songwriter as well, and composed a number of the songs in his later films. In fact he turns out to be a good musician, well trained in the piano and also the bass guitar. 

According to the story told under the 'singing career' link, Eastwood developed a love of country and Western music when he went to a Bob Wills concert as a youth. It has come up from the beginning towards quite late in his career. Even if his singing was never his very best quality, the Western album from his youth is serviceable; and his musical contributions to his art, excepting the singing, have been significant. 

I owe the gentleman an apology. He had talents I never suspected in addition to the clear ones about which the whole world knows. 

The Mexican Model

Dissent magazine has a lengthy discussion, with fully-formed rebuttals, of why Mexico's left-wing progressive "Morena" party has done well while right-wing parties have been on the rise globally. The basic argument is simple enough: 

Morena has delivered for its base. The transformation in the lives of working-class Mexicans under its rule is undeniable. Since taking power in late 2018, average labor income has risen 30 percent above inflation, lifting more than 13 million people out of poverty. Inequality, measured by the income share of the top 1 percent, has seen its steepest and fastest drop in almost a century, matching in four years what had previously taken nearly two decades to accomplish.

These changes are the result of Morena’s efforts, which have included dismantling a set of labor policies that condemned nearly half of Mexican workers to poverty wages. Under Morena, the minimum wage has tripled at the border and more than doubled nationwide, vacation days have doubled, employer retirement contributions have tripled, outsourcing has been curbed, and secret-ballot union elections are now mandatory. This package of reforms is a historic achievement that has improved millions of lives in ways the left has long only imagined.

As a result, a renewed sense of hope has taken root in Mexico. Trust in government has more than doubled, satisfaction with democracy has surged, and belief that the state governs for the people has reached a historic high.

That was a model that worked here for the Democratic Party back when it was a pro-union party. During the Clinton years, the party began the transition to a party that serves the internationalist elite, from major tech companies like Microsoft to the NAFTA/TPP international trade crowd. 

I'm not going to float an opinion on tariffs. In the 90s I found the libertarian arguments convincing, i.e. that free trade benefitted all; in fact, it seems to have functioned to empower international mega-corporations rather than enriching the people in the various countries. Mexico had NAFTA in the 1990s, and still the people worked for starvation wages -- but not starvation enough that China couldn't out-compete them with even greater poverty among the workers, nor that southeast Asia couldn't out-compete China. During this time the corporations that leveraged all this got fantastically wealthy; shipping firms grew gigantic, as we mined minerals in Africa and sent them to Asia to be turned into products that were shipped to the US and Europe for sale. The worker didn't get a fairer shake, though they were often glad to get even those jobs given the alternative was actual starvation. 

Trump and Morena are both offering alternatives to that in their own way; it amuses me that they don't see themselves as in a sense aligned, given that they are both rejecting that vision in favor of one that is better for the people. One calls it populism and nationalism, the other progress, but both are trying to claw back power, wealth, and control for the people instead of these mega-corporate powers. 

Anyway, if you want to engage with and think about a thoughtful discussion from the other side, here is one to consider.