Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Quillette
by Carlton Bell

“The central risk of AI is not that machines will become malevolent. It is that human incentive structures, amplified by scalable technology, outrun our ability to govern them.” (03/27/26)

https://quillette.com/2026/03/27/the-innovation-trap-ai-technology-progress-risk/

Source: The American Conservative
by Andrew Day

“As analysts have emphasized, Tehran ‘gets a vote’ as to when this war ends, and it doesn’t plan to stop until the U.S. and Israel learn that attacking Iran comes with high costs and shouldn’t be repeated in the future. The U.S., unable to hammer out an agreement, has been hammering Iran to coerce it to the negotiating table. … The Trump administration misunderstands the nature of the problem. To end the war, it needs to get tough not with America’s adversary, but with its cobelligerent: Israel.” (03/27/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/to-end-the-iran-war-trump-must-divorce-israel/

Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp

“MySpace kicked off an era in which nearly two out of three humans on the planet use social media platforms to connect with others, share opinions and content, and, yes, sometimes scroll obsessively through everything on offer. You or I may or may not like social media. You or I may or may not use social media. And, even though it’s pretty much the unique distinguishing development of the 21st century (everything else, including perpetual war, is just variation on eternal themes), you and I don’t HAVE to use social media. Nor was K.G.M. forced to use social media. But on March 25, a California jury awarded her $6 million in ‘damages’ — half ‘compensatory’ and half punitive —  from Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), because she allegedly suffers from anxiety and depression and blames social media for those problems.” (03/26/26)

https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20465

Source: Reason
by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Here’s a good rule of thumb, both for understanding foreign policy and also for life in general: When someone offers a bunch of rapid-fire and mutually irreconcilable justifications for a controversial decision, they’re not telling you the whole story. William Shakespeare might have invoked letting slip the dogs of war to describe the unleashing of violence, but these days we just ‘wag the dog.’ Popularized by Our American Cousin — the play being performed at Ford’s Theatre when President Abraham Lincoln was shot — the phrase took on an explicitly political meaning after the ripped-from-the-headlines 1997 film Wag the Dog. In that otherwise pretty awful movie, a fabricated military conflict was used to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. Since then, the term has become shorthand for the idea that leaders sometimes use military action to divert attention from problems at home.” (03/26/26)

https://reason.com/2026/03/26/a-tail-wagging-a-dog-forever/

Source: The American Conservative
by Doug Bandow

“American officials and commentators are outraged that Moscow would stoop so low, helping another country to — cue manifold expressions of fury and outrage — kill U.S. military personnel. (Some have also claimed that Russia provided intelligence to the Yemeni Houthis targeting Western merchantmen and American warships in the Red Sea, and, less credibly, paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan.) Such critics of Moscow are like Captain Renault, who famously discovered gambling occurring at Rick’s Café Américain in the movie Casablanca. Shocking! Shut the establishment! Those demanding action offer few helpful suggestions, preferring, for instance, to call on the administration to ‘respond with clarity and resolve.’ Meaning what, precisely? Perhaps provide financial and military support to Moscow’s adversary, even planning the latter’s battlefield operations. Oh, wait! That is what Washington has been doing for years.” (03/26/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/in-iran-russia-pays-america-back-for-aiding-ukraine/