“The United Arab Emirates spent eight years and a fortune trying to own a stretch of water. It bought proxies, seized islands, built runways and naval bases along both banks of the Bab el-Mandeb, and sold the whole program to Washington as the wall that would keep Iran out of the Red Sea. In September the wall fell, and the water passed to Iran’s closest ally. The chokepoint that a decade of state planning was meant to secure is now held by the Houthis, allied with Tehran. There is no cleaner illustration of what happens when a government sets out to engineer a region from above.” (09/22/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Eldar Mamedov
“The apparent hope is that Saudi Arabia will suffer enough to abandon its diversification strategy and join the Abraham Accords, bending the knee to the U.S. and Israel. But the neocons, whether they know it or not, face a big problem: Even before Trump rejected MbS’s request to bomb the Houthis, Washington had shown it can’t be trusted as a Saudi partner. Trump’s refusal to help MbS out of the Yemeni jam serves to further highlight that fact, making Riyadh less likely to tighten its security relations with the U.S. and its client Israel.” (09/22/26)
“Pity the poor medical provider who, barely out of the Silk Road camel transport or Bell-era telephone communications, has to deal with patients (more properly called ‘customers’ in economics) who would rather use time-saving and efficient electronic communications! This medical provider will often use government regulation as an excuse and claim that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) forbids email communications with patients, while establishing a patient portal is too expensive. In reality, HIPAA bans neither encrypted nor unencrypted email.” (09/21/26)
“The midterm elections are six weeks away. Suddenly, a debate has erupted over the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. Jacob Coxon, a little-known Silicon Valley researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and went public with a dire warning: AI now threatens the future of the world. Shortly beforehand, news broke of the Hugging Face episode, in which OpenAI’s advanced AI ‘agents’ autonomously hacked another company’s computers. Almost on cue, Democrats seized on the alarm as a new cause célèbre, accusing Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of recklessly courting Armageddon. The Left demanded international treaties, ignoring the dismal record of such globalist projects: the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Washington Naval Treaty, the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord, and the UN Human Rights Council.” (09/22/26)
“In the early morning hours of August 30, a baby petting zoo donkey named Heehaw was gunned down by a Cedartown, Georgia police officer Trenton Garner in his own pasture. Reports suggest that Cedartown officers were assisting Polk County Police with locating a missing person. The officers had entered his owner’s property without ‘permission or warning.’ When the baby donkey approached them in the dark, braying — as donkeys tend to do — an officer opened fire. HeeHaw’s owner, Hannah Israel, has vowed legal action. While such a high-profile case may induce the city to settle, absent a settlement offer, the doctrine of qualified immunity largely puts justice out of reach. But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1982, contrary to congressional command, the Supreme Court inserted the words ‘“clearly established’ into the text of Section 1983 in the Civil Rights Act of 1871.” (09/21/26)
“It has been very hard for people not obsessively focused on the subject of artificial intelligence to come away with reasonable opinions about what the future holds. There have been so many extreme predictions of both a positive and negative sort that broad skepticism about anything said on the subject is fully warranted. But while that skepticism is healthy, I have to admit my own views have evolved significantly just over the past few months.” (09/21/26)
“Democratic candidates and activists appear all-in on ‘Medicare for All.’ Many supporters of the idea envision a nationwide universal healthcare system that would be financed primarily by increasing taxes on the super-rich. A recent Echelon Insights poll, for example, found that 74% of voters who support Medicare for All believe it could be financed entirely by raising taxes on billionaires. This is a pipe dream. No country in the world makes health care universally free, paid solely by their wealthiest taxpayers.” (09/21/26)
“In 2008 Californians approved a $10 billion bond measure as down payment on a $45 billion, 800-mile bullet-train system. At the time, a policy analyst suggested that many people ‘sense that maybe that [bullet train] is something I can use at some point. It’s something they can relate to.’ Hence the 52.7% support. … It’s become clear that the only likely result of California’s ‘high-speed’ project, in addition to lining the pockets of the politically well-connected, will be duplicating and interrupting an already-existing service.” (09/21/26)
