Gongol.com Archives: March 2026
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March 1, 2026
A little inter-governmental competition is good for us
In a social-media post about the outbreak of hostilities in Iran, a member of Ireland's Dail (the national legislature) inadvertently makes a very good case for American Federalism. Ken O'Flynn's post says, in part, "The UK has issued clear advice to its nationals. They have been told to register their presence and stay in close contact with their Foreign Office. Irish citizens deserve the same clarity from our Government." ■ The United Kingdom is a country of just about 70 million people, with a long history of empire and institutional coordination overseas. Ireland has about 5.5 million people, and though Ireland is rich, it has a far less sprawling history across the globe. ■ But because the two countries are geographically close, share a language, and have lots of communication with one another, it doesn't sound odd for a legislator in Ireland to say that his country ought to have government services that are comparable in quality and scope with those of a neighbor nearly 13 times larger. It merely sounds like a politician finding an issue that has a plausible chance of sticking to his rivals. ■ Ireland has about as many people as South Carolina, while the UK has about the population of California and Texas combined. Fortunately for South Carolina, California, and Texas, the United States is governed so that state-level officials can largely outsource questions of diplomacy and overseas affairs to the national government, and instead focus on issues closer to home. ■ But a case like this is a good reminder that there is a great deal that the Federal system can and should leave to the states -- just like the 10th Amendment expressly orders it to do. Leaders in South Carolina, California, Texas, and indeed all of the other states are perfectly capable of looking at the policies and outcomes in the other states and adopting or adapting as they see fit. ■ Competition for good policy-making is almost always good for the public. So is the discretion for most policies to be decided as close as possible to the people affected by those policies. Efforts to nationalize too many questions, rather than handling them locally, is a recipe for unnecessary tensions, policy uncertainty, and legislative gridlock. Healthy competition shouldn't be exercised in the world of sports alone.
A British project has placed 100 benches in public parks, each with a small light and a sign directing the viewer to helplines for mental health services. It's a simple but commendable effort to give people something tangible to encounter in the real world, gently reaching people at vulnerable times.
March 2, 2026
Kuwaiti air defenses shoot down three US fighters
A costly day of mistakes
Hot air balloon gets stuck atop radio tower
(Video) The rescue -- at 920' in the air -- was successful. The drone video will probably give you vertigo.
March 4, 2026
Out on the fringes of technology applications, it can be difficult to tell who's acting out of ignorant stupidity and who's acting out of real nefarious intent. While in life, it is generally prudent to follow Hanlon's Razor ("Never ascribe to malice that which can be equally explained by stupidity"), cutting-edge technological applications beg us to take a second look at malice. There tends to be such overwhelming belief in first-mover advantage that clever malice cloaks itself in the costume of stupidity, hoping to get away with it. ■ Take the rise of artificial-intelligence chatbots as purported substitutes for human friends. There are ads out in the wild, hoping to ensnare people in engagement with computer programs that are very good at predicting the next word in a sentence. And they're doing it with the aid of language like, "Less needy than a dog but just as curious." ■ That's the phrase that triggers the question: Stupid or malicious? One of the main things we know about friendship is that it's really important to feel needed by others. It means that you and your actions are important to the world! ■ That a dog needs you is a feature of the relationship, not a bug. To have a dog means that another being depends on you -- it needs you. That is a significant part of the pet relationship for a whole lot of people: Being needed is psychologically meaningful. ■ Perhaps the marketing writers for apps like "Friend" know their Viktor Frankl ("The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself"), and perhaps they do not. But in framing "friendship" as something devoid of interdependence, they betray either an extremely alarming ignorance of psychology, or an even more alarming choice to actively undermine it. ■ These "AI friend" apps are selling nothing more than chatty Tamagotchi, minus the psychic reward. There certainly are defensible use cases for automated response systems, as long as the humans involved are able to understand that they are using tools and not making "friends" with a ghost inside the computer. But when a technology expressly invites people to let down their defenses and short-circuit the meaning of normal human interaction, then it's time to ask aloud whether something more sinister is afoot.
March 5, 2026
The headline is intentionally provcative: "What to know about the virus with no vaccine, treatment hitting certain states". "No vaccine and no treatment" suggests that the only thing for the public to do is panic, or at least worry. ■ The reality is that the virus in question, HMPV (for "human metapneumovirus"), is neither new nor particularly alarming. The CDC says: "Symptoms include cough, fever, nasal congestion, and shortness of breath." While it would be very good to have either a preventative vaccine or a cure, those symptoms aren't all that different from many other common seasonal respiratory viruses. ■ What should be much more actionable is the general matter of mitigating the spread. Respiratory viruses go around a lot in the winter because people tend to stay indoors, breathing the same air over and over. Sooner or later, we will learn to take indoor air quality seriously in the same way that we've learned to take water quality. ■ People spent a long time resisting many of the water-quality steps we accept as perfectly normal today -- segregation and treatment of sanitary wastewater, routine filtration and testing of drinking water, and disinfection processes for potable water as well as treated wastewater. They were resisted in no small part because people resisted the evidence that their drinking water was contaminated by human waste, and that the waste matter was making them sick. It was too disgusting for many to believe. ■ Today, we tend to resist the idea that breathing contaminated air makes us sick, even though we are just a couple of years removed from the worst airborne pandemic in a century. That unwillingness to face unpleasant facts will look silly soon enough, too. We should be devoting much better efforts to monitoring indoor air quality and routinely filtering or otherwise treating for pathogens. Air purifiers have become more commonplace, especially since 2020, but it remains rare to see them systematically used on a large scale or to see public spaces continuously monitored for easily measurable variables like carbon dioxide concentration. ■ Just because it's unpleasant to think about breathing a sort of viral soup made up of other people's waste air doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand about it. Curtailing the spread of HMPV, the common cold, influenza, and other airborne viruses would be a huge step forward for human well-being. It ought to be well within our reach to do better.
March 6, 2026
It may be an exaggeration or a convenient re-framing of unrelated events, but Iran is claiming to deliberately target Amazon Web Services infrastructure with weapons amid the conflict with the United States. Any such claim should be reviewed critically, but even the effort to claim the behavior is a fairly new development in armed conflict. ■ Cybersecurity experts have rightly been sounding the alarm for years about digital operations being conducted in the name of Iran. This is a turn in the direction of saying that data centers aren't just targets for gray-zone operations, but targets for full-on kinetic warfare, too. ■ The very international nature of cloud-based services muddies the waters of traditional boundries a bit. In the past, a combatant state might try to blow up its opponent's power plants. A successful attack would almost certainly land on the opponent's territory and have most of its effects specifically on the rival country. ■ An attack on a cloud-based service is different. A data center may well be located away from its country of "domicile", and if it's public-facing, then the odds are practically zero that any damage done would be contained. ■ Thus, an attack nominally against the United States might well take place on the soil of a different nation and affect data belonging to a positively United-Nations-esque array of other countries. ■ The rules of conflict have been evolving in a big way for a while now, and the changes are far from over. What remains to be seen is just how far national interests will be defined to reach. Do data centers need anti-missile interceptor systems?
March 8, 2026
It doesn't seem like we should still be naive about basic scientific matters like thunderstorms and forests, but the American Geophysical Union recently announced a novel scientific discovery: That trees show weak electrical discharges during thunderstorms. It's been speculated for some time, but the actual documented observations are completely new. A Pennsylvania State University team figured it out by simulating the effect in the lab and then documenting it from a modified Toyota Sienna in the field. ■ The bottom line to the effect seems to be that the electrical charge may damage sensitive parts of the tree, so trees may have evolved around it to preserve themselves. But possibly more interesting is that it means that a forest in a thunderstorm glows -- but in a way that human eyes can't see. ■ It's easy for us to forget that there are lots of phenomena that we can't detect with human senses -- some animals can see ultraviolet light or echolocate in frequencies we can't hear. And there's no end to what we're missing throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. ■ So what if we can't hear porpoises gossiping in ultrasonic frequencies? Or that we can't tell what dogs are sniffing from one another every time they go outdoors. It's not important that we have all the answers, but it would be wise for us to touch base with our humility once in a while, to acknowledge that there are lots of things that escape our detection yet are just as real as anything we can see or hear. Sometimes it's just good enough to remember that we are far from omniscient.
March 9, 2026
Despite public proclamations that the conflict with Iran will be over "very soon", the public should be clear-eyed about the extremely high probability that a heightened level of trouble is here to stay for no short duration. Two things make this likely. ■ The first is that the new supreme leader of Iran is the son of the man just killed. This indicates not just that the power structure left behind is choosing continuity, but that it is likely to view the current conflict as existential -- a fight for its very survival. ■ That changes the expected-value equation for what kinds and degrees of conflict the regime will be willing to undertake, probably increasing their risk tolerance by a fair amount. It's not all that different from gambling for resurrection. ■ The second reason to expect more trouble ahead is that Iran already showed significant willingness to use tools of gray-zone conflict before its conventional military forces came under substantial attack. As conventional forces get depleted, they take time to rebuild. Weapons of cyberwarfare and other asymmetrical tools of force aren't as subject to depletion, making them the closest weapons at hand. ■ Overall, this is bad news. Whether the conventional fighting calms down or not, the American public ought to be prepared to expect less-conventional forms of conflict to be around and causing trouble for a fair while to come.
March 10, 2026
After disappearing from the curricula of many American schools for about a decade and a half, some states are reverting to past form and reintroducing requirements to teach the skill in schools. A variety of reasons are argued in favor: One is the usefulness of being able to read the cursive style (in which no small number of old documents are written, from the Declaration of Independence to old census files). Another is the case for the fine motor skills honed by the practice of cursive writing. ■ The best case of all may be that the ability to communicate in written language is one of the most important skills anyone can have in an advanced society like our own. It doesn't come naturally to many people; it is a skill that requires practice and real cognitive development. ■ Different means of writing take different pathways in the brain. Conventional print, handwritten cursive, typing on a keyboard, and even composing from voice to text -- all call upon different component skills, some shared, others not. It stands to reason that anyone seeking to become a good writer probably has a better chance if they have developed and strengthened multiple ways of putting words on a page. ■ We think of writing as a physical act, which it plainly is. But it is also a cognitive feedback loop, which is why the same message from the same author may come out differently, depending on the mode of writing used. Just like it can be useful to know several strategies for working out a math problem, so too can it be useful to have multiple means of composing words and sentences. As long as the process isn't taken too far and instruction in other useful skills isn't completely disrupted, there's a lot of utility in giving people a wide array of ways to tackle the challenges of writing.
March 12, 2026
There may be more unlikely places to find the germ of a political philosophy than the top of a pizza box, but not very many. Yet the lid to a carry-out from Godfather's Pizza carries a wonderful slogan that applies well beyond pepperoni and cheese. "Quality and Abundance" says the box, in a reference that in the literal sense applies to pizza toppings, but in a metaphorical one may be the perfect encapsulation of America's political expectations. ■ "Abundance" is more or less a consensus point. Even among those inclined to favor redistributionist policies, there aren't many who would deny that what is good for the middle class economically is good for the country, and vice-versa. Particular targeted policies have their cheerleaders, but overwhelmingly, most Americans know they are best served by an expanding economy. And by comparison with our closest friends in Europe, America's economy has grown abundantly over the last several decades. The divergence is real. ■ But a 21st Century mindset has expectations of quality from the services one receives from one's government. Abundance alone isn't enough to satisfy; it's hard to look at government services and think that they have, overall, kept pace in their quality with private-sector experiences. ■ Not every private sector experience has gotten substantially better in the last couple of decades; some have gotten worse (or simply stagnated). But most of them have improved at least marginally, and many of them by quite a bit. Inevitably, these experiences become yardsticks by which public-sector encounters are measured. ■ Has your experience with any level of government become substantially better in the way that televisions have gone from cathode ray tubes to flat-panel TVs in recent decade. Has your experience with the IRS improved in the same way that your experience with online banking has improved? Does your experience with Medicare match your experience with Amazon Medical or Mark Cuban's Cost-Plus drug retailer?
March 13, 2026
Reuters claims to have exclusive reporting on a huge mass layoff at Meta (the name for what was once known solely as Facebook). The job cuts could include as many as 1 in 5 of the company's current employees. ■ And it wouldn't be the first big layoff at the company even just in recent memory. This raises a very significant question about the incentive structures being created. A company capable of separating from a fifth of its workforce without completely reinventing its core product or service is gambling hard that future talented employees will overlook the evident uncertainty about the job's stability. ■ Employee loyalty may have been assumed, baked-in, and possibly even abused in many cases for quite some time. But if Meta goes through with these reported layoffs, it will send a rather loud and clear message that employee loyalty to anything but the very next paycheck isn't valued much. ■ Reasons can always be found to explain why "this time it's different", but it almost never is. And if the signals are going into effect to say that pay checks alone rule over the employer-employee relationship, then we really have gone for a different balance than before. Company culture, a sense of mission, and unique work challenges all used to be factors that employers would tout as strengths worth applying to experience. They may have been overstated in the past, but surely they weren't worth nothing.
March 14, 2026
A series of dimes being struck to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence will feature an eagle clutching the arrows of war but looking to an empty claw where the olive branch should be. It's called the "Emerging Liberty" design, in reference to the peace and liberty sought by the generation of the Founders but denied by their subjugation to England. ■ It's good that many Americans notice the absence of the olive branches and recognize the symbolism. And to the attentive eye, the eagle on the special dime is looking to its empty talons -- it wants peace, but the peace is denied. ■ There should never be any doubt or confusion about which the eagle (or America) prefers: The peace of liberty. In cases when that peace is denied, we might be forced to resort to the arrows of war. But never as a matter of preference.
March 15, 2026
For decades, the complaint has gone something to the effect of, "We (in America) don't want to be the world's police force." Our strategic policy has been to pursue the model of a sheriff with deputies -- a clear leader setting a common agenda, with many strong allies to share the work as a posse. With this model in mind, we have browbeaten our allies to carry their own weight as defensive powers. ■ Some of that pressure has been rightly placed, considering the symbolic (if not literal) trade-offs between generous domestic spending on social programs and stingier expenditures on European militaries. The spending itself has a purpose, of course, but it's also symbolic, sending signals about courage and willingness to fight. ■ Allies strong enough to be useful partners in a coalition arrangement are also strong enough that they ought to have well-ordered opinions about policies in their own long-term interests. Thus it should be no surprise that in the absence of a clear and compelling case for what to do about Iran, prospective allies are rejecting pressure to lend open-ended help to the United States. ■ Reminiscing about World War II, Dwight Eisenhower noted, ""[T]he American soldier, in spite of wisecracking, sometimes cynical speech, is an intelligent human being who demands and deserves basic understanding of the reasons why his country took up arms and of the conflicting consequences of victory or defeat." Such a case is owed any partner in arms, as well as to the people.
March 17, 2026
Two separate wildfires in Nebraska have burned a combined 800,000 acres in the last week. The fires have taken place mostly in sparsely-populated cattle country, but the scale of the fires is enormous. The burned area is getting very close to the area of the entire state of Rhode Island. ■ It's hard to find a lot of national news coverage about the incidents, even though they are so geographically huge that it's hard to see them all at once, even from the air. That's unfortunate, and it's also a missed opportunity. ■ Historically, the threat of urban fires came mainly from within cities: Something would ignite a building and lots of adjacent buildings made of flammable materials would catch fire in turn. It's what devastated New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Boston, among other American cities, in the 1800s. Public water systems, automatic sprinklers, and professional firefighting departments have all together rendered that style of urban conflagration a thing of the past. ■ But fires that jump from wildfires into urbanized areas -- as has happened in Hawaii, Colorado, and California in recent years -- are a complex and severely under-addressed problem. There aren't a lot of cities in the way of the current fires in Nebraska, but there are some populated communities under threat, and getting the problem in front of the public is a matter of converting theoretical problems into visible, tangible ones with real consequences both here and now. We are very good at forgetting the last disaster before doing anything about preventing the next one. That really ought to end.
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March 19, 2026
A forever future for the "Forever" stamp people
The financial situation for the US Postal Service is looking dire, with the venerable institution expecting to run out of cash in the next 12 months unless it receives some form of assistance. The GAO reports that the Postal Service has "lost money every fiscal year but one since 2007", despite cost-cutting efforts and rate increases that have come more often than once a year since 2020. ■ The mandate imposed on the Postal Service -- to deliver government-defined services while fending for itself in an increasingly competitive market environment -- appears to have passed a point of some unsustainability. It's very much for the good that its competitors exist, ranging from FedEx to e-mail, but the situation forces us to behave like adults. ■ A serious government should possess certain capacities. Among them: The abilities to mint currency, to conduct diplomacy abroad, and to provide universal postal service. These need not be money-making activities. If some of the costs can be captured through some user fees (like postage stamps), that can be just fine. ■ But the services themselves are part of ensuring the orderly provision of value to the public without having to go through intermediaries. A functioning postal system guarantees that citizens can pay their taxes, vote by mail, and receive jury summonses (among many other functions) without having to go through an intermediary like a phone company or an Internet service provider. It's not glamorous, it's functional. But it's also a mark of state capacity -- a government with the ability to organize itself to do basic, necessary things. ■ Like many things, the condition of the US Postal Service is boring but important. We have too many fellow Americans who want everything in political, social, or civic life to be exciting or stimulating. That's the wrong course, and it leaves us exposed to real failures when we fail to act like adults who are worthy of running a great nation. Whatever the right answer is to secure the future of the US Postal Service, we need to seek it out and implement it with the urgency it deserves.
March 20, 2026
CBS News to shut down radio operation
In one respect, the announcement that CBS News is closing down its radio news division is little more than a business decision. Radio news struggles financially in a world where on-demand content satisfies much of the demand for speech-based programming that long could only be found on news, talk, and full-service radio stations. ■ If a "news/talk" radio station is putting out 16 or 17 minutes per hour of advertising while a podcast carries a fraction of that (and can be paused, restarted, or fast-forwarded on-demand), then it's inevitable that listeners will drift away. What's bad for the stations carrying network programming (like news bulletins) becomes bad for the networks. ■ But the closure of CBS News Radio is something more than that: It's an act of vandalism against a storied institution. You wouldn't keep it open just because it was once the home of Edward R. Murrow -- but that history should play a part in the institutional self-respect that CBS Radio News should carry today. It's not just nostalgic that the World News Roundup has been running continuously for more than 80 years, it's a self-reinforcing standard within a profession like journalism: Don't screw up your work today, or you'll be the one who brought shame on a legendary broadcast. ■ Institutions don't deserve to survive just for their own sake, but the people entrusted to run them should have enormous respect for the duty to keep them vibrant, relevant, and well-adapted to the future. Traditions don't just matter to historians; they inform how we conduct ourselves in the present. ■ On balance, we should reasonably guess that old institutions at the very least contain the artifacts of decisions reached through trial and error -- a costly way of learning, but one which humankind seems intent on using above all others. As it has been said before, we can't create new old institutions. And if it looks like someone who was managing an institution let it decay, wither, or slip, then that failure ought to bring them shame.
March 21, 2026
Robert Mueller, fighter of fear
As the world grows ever more materially prosperous, we can watch with satisfaction as many different forms of suffering are mitigated. Extreme poverty, infant mortality, and vaccine-preventable deaths have all shown marked improvement in the last century. ■ But not every harm can be mitigated by prosperity. Fear, alas, is with us in more forms than ever. This is in part because fear can be weaponized. Terrorism is a weapon preferred by some movements and ideologies, precisely because it works even against the wealthy. ■ Robert Mueller, who has just died at age 81, was a committed opponent of fear. He assumed leadership of the FBI just a week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and reframed the bureau's entire mission to deprive terrorism of its power to spread fear. ■ The world needs people of Mueller's cast: Methodical, unassuming, and extremely proficient. People willing to do the thankless tasks that give others lives with less fear. People willing to take skills that have significant market value and apply them instead to the public interest. We don't often know how fortunate we are to have strong, civic-minded leaders like Robert Mueller among us until they are gone.
March 22, 2026
Travelers at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson have reported unfathomable delays at the TSA security checkpoints, with WSB-TV reporting 5-hour waits and the airport itself officially advising, "Due to current federal conditions, passengers are advised to allow at least 3 hours or more for domestic and 4 or hours or more for international screenings. Allow additional time for checked baggage." ■ What "current federal conditions" really means: TSA agents aren't receiving paychecks, and at least a third of the agents at Atlanta have called in sick. A last-minute, ad-hoc plan to send ICE agents to the airports to supplement the TSA is supposedly to take effect with the start of the work week. ■ As a matter of principle, citizen encounters with government should be safe, respectful, and as unobtrusive as possible. Delays of five or six hours fail miserably on the yardstick of "unobtrusive". Moreover, they're hardly respectful of citizens' time, and they're really not safe, either, since they create enormous crowds of people gathered prior to security screening. ■ More than 20 years ago, then-President Bill Clinton made a big display of "Government that Works Better for Less". It was a popular promise that even predated the assembly of the Department of Homeland Security, the funding of which is the ultimate source of the airport security delays today. Yet we seem farther away right now from that promise of efficient, effective government services than we did in the Clinton era. Surely the buck must stop on someone's desk somewhere.
March 23, 2026
Small gains, widely distributed
The price of crude oil has rocketed up by about 50% since the start of the year, due predominantly to geopolitical forces far beyond the reach of ordinary people. The future is uncertain, but there are highly plausible conditions under which the prices could stay high for years to come. ■ The problem for many households is that choices made about major purchases, like vehicles, often last for years to come. The average passenger car or truck on the road today is 12.8 years old. If that trend continues, then the average vehicle sold today will probably still be on the road in 2039. ■ Many of the major automakers have pressed hard on fully electric vehicles -- the race to catch up with Tesla has been evident, and it has produced some very impressive new models. But it's also led to a lot of split lineups, with many manufacturers offering EVs, gas guzzlers, and little in between. ■ GM touts its status as the #2 EV seller in the US, but it doesn't offer much between pure EV and combustion, while Stellantis nixed its plug-in hybrid family for 2026. The market seems to have been responding heavily to the availability, then the repeal, of EV tax credits. ■ Toyota, meanwhile, has long taken heat from environmental groups for offering less in the pure-EV market. But it claims that just shy of half its US sales are now "electrified" in some form. That's resulted in a fleet-wide average fuel efficiency of 29 miles per gallon, partly the result of the largest five-year efficiency gain of any major manufacturer, according to the EPA. ■ It's a compelling case study in the value of steady, widely-distributed improvement. It might have been flashier to roll out lots of all-electric vehicles, but when the highest-volume automaker makes a fleetwide improvement of a solid 12% in half a decade, that results in significant market-wide efficiency gains. Those would pay off in normal times, but they really pay off in the face of an oil price shock. ■ We ought to appreciate persistent, unglamorous improvements (especially when they are widely distributed) just as much as we applaud splashy breakthroughs that often don't penetrate quite as far. Modest but wide-reaching innovations can end up delivering big results.
March 25, 2026
A California jury has decided against Google and Facebook's parent company in a case that sought damages for a young woman who claimed that her use of YouTube and Instagram led to depression and anxiety that have harmed her into adulthood. The jury wants her to emerge from the case with $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages. ■ Without passing judgment on the merits of the case, the situation does put a spotlight on a problem deserving of some big-picture consideration. It is basically self-evident that many online services are optimized (if not expressly designed from their very first line of code) to reward addictive behavior. Television and radio programming have long sought to maximize time spent viewing or listening; what's available on a computer or smartphone screen is different only in intensity and measurability, really. ■ Adults should have self-control. But self-control isn't natural; it is learned, trained, and practiced. Children don't naturally have it (not usually and not in large measure, at least), so to develop it, they need to receive that training before adulthood. ■ Meanwhile, adults who do not have it need to develop the desire to have it before they can learn it. Human nature likes to gorge on sweet foods and binge on entertainment and generally just laze about. Most of the good things truly worth having come from accessing self-control and putting it to focused use. ■ But if adults aren't doing enough to form that self-control in young people -- especially while some people are reaping big financial rewards for trying to circumvent it and start long-term addictions -- then society is headed for a whole lot of trouble. Whatever the truth and the merits of a particular court decision, the bigger story is not just one about a few apps. It's much more about what feedback loops and habits of the mind are being chosen and rewarded, and how dangerous it is to wait passively until it is too late to start forming the right ones.
March 27, 2026
The student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania has come out with guns blazing in an editorial against the prevalence of artificial intelligence in the educational environment. Even for a college newspaper, the language is fierce: "AI cannot coexist with education -- it can only degrade it. As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought. With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship." ■ The stakes are high, so perhaps the intemperate rhetoric is suitable. It's nothing new for an innovative technology to make a lot of waves before inviting a backlash, even if this particular hype cycle seems to be playing out at 10x speed. ■ Philosophically, a certain limitation cannot be escaped: While it is obviously the case that some subjects and skills can be learned without any reflection on the part of the learner, the real root of the liberal arts is that humans need to study for becoming, rather than being. ■ In learning one thing, we discover deficiencies, errors, or omissions in what we know about others. It's a process that takes place across time, and furthermore, it is one that imposes physical sensations and chemical changes within our brains. The "Aha!" moment isn't some dull bridging of two file trees inside a digital disk drive. It's an experience with a "before", "during", and "after" -- and it's often as emotional as it is intellectual. It feels good, literally, to solve problems. ■ A thing without physiology can't have those experiences, can't understand them, and should never be asked to substitute for them. There will be ways artificial intelligence will enhance certain specific learning processes. But some people seem so eager to see it as central to an arms race that they miss the huge range of impossibilities that it cannot escape, and that human nature can never be successfully reduced to mere outcomes.
March 28, 2026
Civilian leaders need military reading lists
As the United States has continued to professionalize its military leadership, moving far away from the practice of swelling and shrinking that prevailed prior to World War II, one of the laudable practices that has been widely adopted is the publication of professional reading lists. These come from top brass, and they are meant to point lower-level leaders towards ideas that ought to help them contribute more creatively and thoughtfully to the nation's defense. ■ The Chief of Naval Operations, for instance, recommends books that have obvious military applicability (like "Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars"), but he also lists books like Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", an extremely important work by a Holocaust survivor about the very essence of life. ■ Many of the entries in these kinds of reading lists are exactly what one might hope that military leaders are thinking about (Britain's Chief of the Air Staff recommends "The Taiwan Story: How a Small Island Will Dictate the Global Future"), but the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force is not alone in recommending much older writers like Audie Murphy and Dwight Eisenhower. Much of what's worth knowing or considering, at least at the strategic level, has been around for decades and even centuries. ■ Considering the importance of civilian leadership and control of the military, we really ought to expect political leaders to have performed their own due diligence by completing their own reading lists. War isn't a video game, and anyone who has thoughtfully digested even a single serious war memoir realizes that. Even some movies (like "Dunkirk" or "Bridge on the River Kwai") belong on such a list because their screenplays force audiences to consider what might go wrong. (Nobody should be allowed anywhere near a chain of command until they've watched "Dr. Strangelove".) ■ A military that continues to develop itself in the direction of better skills, wider knowledge, and stronger ethics deserves civilian control typified by the same.
March 29, 2026
Book review: "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?"
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't know that "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" would be his last manuscript. But as the last complete work before his untimely death, it offers a fitting and lasting contribution to his country and society in his name. ■ When historical perspective reduces King to abbreviations, highlights, and pull quotes, there is much from which to choose, but it leaves an incomplete impression. In "Where Do We Go from Here", King furnishes a much more complete understanding of the civil rights movement as a necessary but incomplete stage in America's development. ■ He supplies a vital explanation of the continuum from predecessors like Booker T. Washington (with a clear-eyed critique that Washington was right to appeal to high-minded ideals but "underestimated the structures of evil") to his own choice to reject violence and separatism ("If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory") while sustaining pressure for higher expectations. ■ King's analysis of the situation in the late 1960s has frustratingly broad relevance today -- perhaps because we lost his presence as a leader who could have sustained pressure for worthwhile changes that would have gone beyond just the civil rights long denied. The King of this text is one who offers real policy prescriptions that we can debate even now. "I Have a Dream" may be what we remember him saying (and it is well worth remembering), but it wasn't his final word on matters. ■ In this book, King criticizes the wide-reaching consequences of the Vietnam War, advocates for a universal basic income, and has no shortage of demands for educational reform ("Education is too important today to be left to professional fads and needs [...] there must be a greater evidence of competence"). We can engage with these and his other ideas on subjects like housing policy as reasonable adults today who have the benefit of nearly 60 years of hindsight. (We can also be chagrined by six decades of missed opportunities.) ■ We shouldn't leave King in the history books or merely fixed in granite: He earned his place in those books and is a thoroughly fitting choice for a memorial tribute. But even though he is no longer living, the thoughts he recorded remain relevant to our choices today. Reading them and incorporating them into our understanding of the present is a way not only to honor him, but also to treat our country as one worthy of continued betterment.
March 31, 2026
One of the first items every new President should be issued is a copy of "Regime Change for Dummies" (or "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Regime Change"). Nevermind that no such books currently exist; they should. And the very first page could read, "If six consecutive decades of trying haven't made it happen in Cuba, name one good reason your plan will work better somewhere else". ■ Despite vexing every President since John F. Kennedy, Cuba still has a nominally Communist government that doesn't look substantially more liberal than it did in the 1960s. There has been enormous suffering and hardship for the Cuban people, but little in the way of change. ■ USA Today is reporting that diplomatic talks between the US and Cuba may be close to yielding some kind of economic cooperation. ■ It still doesn't sound like regime change is actually on the table, though, offering the prospect (perhaps) of some material relief for the people. But it should not go unnoticed by any President (or the people around him or her) that the stated goal has eluded America's efforts. Despite the ease with which the phrase "regime change" rolls off the tongue, we have few if any case studies illustrating how it can be successfully done.