The Good Guys Made Sloppy Mistakes. Anthropic Courts Religious Leaders to Sell Bizarre Fantasies. Is Higher Education Moving South? Justice Alito on Covid and Our Rights. More
In fighting terrorism, the good guys have to be right every time.
“Multiple Security Failures Allowed FlyDubai Pilot into Cockpit” is a Wall Street Journal headline. It reveals just how many times the good guys got it wrong—and several times purely because of sloppiness:
Before Hamam al-Hammami stood behind his captain on FlyDubai Flight 1073 and raised an emergency ax to begin the assault that nearly brought down the plane, there had been ample opportunity for authorities in three countries to keep him from getting anywhere near that cockpit.
Oman had scrutinized his online habits and decided he showed too much interest in radical ideology to trust as a pilot at state carrier Oman Air, where he worked. They banned him from flying, sent him to a deradicalization program and put him in a desk job but didn’t flag their concerns more broadly, people familiar with the matter said.
When FlyDubai hired him in February, it didn’t contact Oman to vet his experience.
The last chance to stop him before the airport came in Israel. It was a low bar—pilots from countries like Oman that don’t have diplomatic relations are barred from flying to the country, so Hammami should have been stopped outright.
Danielle Pletka takes a look at how the New York Times covered the attempted hijacking—or “altercation in the cockpit” in Times speak and concludes that the mainstream media is irredeemable.
In other news of the not-so-friendly skies, the U.S. military evacuated a dozen B-1 bombers from the RAF Fairford airbase in the UK, with a U.S. official telling Axios that the base is under threat of attack from Iran. Several dual British-Iranian citizens arrested last week are suspected of planning an attack on Fairford.
The flydubai stabbing—in which Iranian influence is suspected-and Fairford suggest that Iran might be switching its tactics to covert and deniable attacks:
The two suspected attacks are raising questions over whether Iran’s war strategy is shifting, but experts caution not to treat the incidents as equally indicative of Iranian involvement — or evidence yet that Tehran has changed its tactics.
Could New York Governor Kathy Hochul have acted in a more provocative fashion when she named New York AG Tish James to investigate the Cornell rape allegations? “Letitia James Appointed Special Council Despite Declaring Guilt of the Accused” is Johanthan Turley’s headline. This is a case that demands a meticulous and objective special counsel, not a partisan activist. But Hochul picked James. Turley doesn’t mince words:
Hochul’s appointment of James maximizes the chances of a criminal charge in the case. James has always followed the policy of the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: “Sentence first, verdict afterward.”
The stunning moment in the Hochul-James presser was when James dismissively declined to comment on a Facebook post prematurely condemning the frat guys—it was her own post. A lawyer for a student has asked James to step down, considering such prior comments. Don’t count on it. Hochul is urged to call a special Albany assembly to tighten rape laws. Meanwhile, Sasha Stone has a fascinating article on what she calls the “consent trap.”
Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s $3 billion donation to start a new campus of Carnegie Mellon in Florida is a loss for New York (whose Mayor all but personally chased Griffin out of town). But Griffin’s Carnegie Mellon bet could pay off big for higher education and the growing Miami region:
Higher education is facing a series of market distortions. Public confidence in America’s universities remains low across the political spectrum. For many years, there’s been an apparent mismatch between what parents and students want and what America’s top universities have offered. Even setting aside the culture-war battles of the last decade, many students and parents seem to doubt the value of higher education, a sentiment that the disruptions of artificial intelligence could easily intensify.
But these market distortions might also create the kinds of opportunities Griffin’s donation could help Carnegie Mellon seize. Vanderbilt University, which is also establishing a campus in the Miami region, provides one case study….
Does AI model Claude have feelings? Does Claude suffer? No, but “Anthropic’s idiot savants are trying to play God while pushing frightening utopian fantasies,” Miranda Devine writes:
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been busy for months wining and dining religious leaders and influencers to try to push their self-serving agenda and utopian fantasies.
The Vatican’s response has been to pour cold water on bizarre claims that Anthropic is embarking on its own “creation story” to give birth to new sentient beings in the form of computer software.
Billionaire co-founder Chris Olah, a 34-year-old Canadian-born evangelical who has turned his back on Christianity, thinks their AI model, Claude, has feelings and a sort of moral consciousness. He’s worried about its “mental health” and believes it experiences human emotions like love and “suffers perpetually,” The New York Times reported.
Devine mentions Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical on AI, which rejects the bizarre notion of machine consciousness. Devine suggests that a real threat to humanity might be Anthropic’s staff composed of “utopians who believe they are uniquely equipped to save humanity thanks to their superior intelligence and extreme wealth.” See also: Anthropic vs. the Pope.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s new book—“So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court and Our Country”—out tomorrow. Adam J. White reviews it for the Washington Free Beacon. Alito was interviewed by Fox Sunday news host Shannon Bream yesterday. She asked the Justice about draconian Covid restrictions:
I think it was a stress test of our constitutional rights.
In other words, it put our loyalty to those constitutional rights, our dedication to those constitutional rights to the test. And one of the things that, unfortunately, it disclosed was that many people were willing to downgrade certain constitutional rights, the right to freedom of speech and the right to the free exercise of religion in particular.
They were willing to make those secondary to other things. The example of the casinos, I thought, was telling. And what I said in the speech was nothing more than what I had said in a written opinion. The governor of Nevada at that time said, the casinos are open. Come back to Las Vegas.
And so people came back to Las Vegas, and there were pictures of people in the casinos. And they were not wearing masks. Not all of them were wearing masks. They certainly were not maintaining a certain degree of separation among themselves. That was all predictable.
But, at the same time, the state had a very severe limit on the number of people who would — could attend a house of worship, no matter how big that house of worship was. A similar thing happened in New York City.
And always the sound of the midterms hurrying near. “Four ways the midterm elections could go, one month away,” by Isaac Arnsdorf at The Washington Post says Dems have polls and history on their side; Republicans have money. The Brazilian race was a shocker. Conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned former President, surged to first place and will be in the Oct. 25 primary.
Two More Things. Here’s how a City Journal piece on the National Book Foundation begins:
“A good coat of paint can hide a multitude of sins,” a time-tested adage maintains. Unless that paint happens to be white—then, according to Columbia University writing professor Wendy Walters, it might have “figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world.” Walters is so exercised by white paint, for which she professes “a genuine and visceral dislike,” that she has written a 352-page book, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, to be published on October 13.
Lest you think Walters’s book is just another indulgence of American academia’s bizarre notion of scholarship, the five judges enlisted by the National Book Foundation have picked A Dead White as one of ten longlisted titles for this year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Joel Klein couples ed union boss Randi Weingarten and 1619’s Nikole Hannah-Jones as two women who have made public education worse in an excellent WSJ op-ed.
