Best of the American columnists NEWS 15
9 April 2022 THE WEEKIsn’t $800bn
enough for
the military?
Paul Waldman
The Washington Post
It’s a sign of the troubled times we live in, says Paul Waldman, that few have questioned President
Biden’s plan for a hike in the military budget. Indeed, the only debate about the proposed increase- from $782bn in 2022 to $813bn in 2023 – has been whether America should be spending even
more. The Republicans think it should. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell declared that the
proposal reflects Biden’s “far-left values” and “falls woefully short”, depriving the defence budget of
“the robust growth we need to keep pace with Russia and China”. Such complaints are a perennial
feature of debates about Pentagon spending, but when you look at the figures, it’s clear they’re
nonsense. The US spends two-and-a-half times as much on defence as Russia and China combined.
In what way are we failing to keep pace with them? “America accounts for almost 40% of the entire
world’s military spending.” China only spends a third of what the US does; Russia, a mere 8%. We
must question the assumption that throwing more money at the Pentagon is the answer to every
problem. What do we want to do that we currently can’t afford to do? “How would spending
$900bn or $1trn a year thwart Putin’s imperial dreams in a way that $800bn a year won’t?”
The dark side
of artificial
intelligence
Margaret Wertheim
Los Angeles Times
Having trained in computer science, says Margaret Wertheim, I’ve never lost much sleep over the
idea of super-intelligent machines enslaving humanity. It makes for fun sci-fi, but computers are
nowhere near true intelligence. Like others, though, I’ve been alarmed by one bit of contemporary
research. Over recent years, machine-learning software has proved a valuable tool for drug
researchers looking to discover new kinds of medication. As a purely theoretical exercise, scientists
working for Collaborations Pharmaceutical Inc., a small but respected player in this field of AI-based
drug discovery, looked to see what would happen if they flipped the target and set their algorithms to
find dangerous drugs instead. The result shocked them. In less than six hours, the software came up
with 40,000 toxic compounds. These included not only known chemical warfare agents, such as VX,
but many other molecules the researchers had never seen before, which “looked equally plausible”
and possibly even more dangerous. The molecules were only designs, and the researchers didn’t try
to synthesise any of the toxins. But given the potential for misuse of this technology, the fact that
commonly-used AI software was so easily able to design lethal compounds “should horrify us all”.“It’s harder and harder to be shocked by Donald Trump,” says David A. Graham, yet somehow
he keeps managing it. In an interview last week, the former president called on Vladimir Putin to
validate Republican claims that a Russian oligarch had paid $3.5m to a company owned by Hunter
Biden, President Biden’s son. If this feels familiar, it’s because Trump did much the same thing before
the 2016 election, when he publicly called on Russia to hack the US government to obtain emails
sent by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state (which it duly did). Back then, Trump could
at least claim to be ignorant of Putin’s true character. But he can hardly do so now. “As Putin bombs
civilians in Ukraine and the world condemns him as a war criminal, Trump is once again asking him
for help besting his political opponents,” Clinton tweeted last week. “What is wrong with him?” The
truth is that Trump keeps doing this stuff because he keeps getting away with it. He recently filed a
“laughable” lawsuit accusing Clinton and other Democrat officials of weaving a “false narrative”
that he was colluding with a hostile foreign power. Why would they need to concoct a false narrative,
though, when Trump is doing the collusion “right there in the open”?Trump is
still colluding
with Putin
David A. Graham
The Atlantic
“I’m still aghast. Still astonished,” said
Frank Bruni in The New York Times.
Days after reading the bizarre text
exchanges between Ginni Thomas,
the wife of supreme court justice
Clarence Thomas, and Mark
Meadows, President Donald Trump’s
chief of staff, I’m still reeling. The
29 messages – among 2,320 that
Meadows provided to the House select
committee investigating the 6 January
assault on the Capitol – were sent after
Trump lost the 2020 election; and they
show just how unmoored from reality
the US Right has become. “Help This
Great President stand firm, Mark!!!,”
writes Thomas, warning that Trump must prevent “the Left”
from carrying out “the greatest Heist of our History”. America,
she says, is witnessing “the end of Liberty”. You expect this stuff
from conspiracy theorists, but Thomas is no fringe figure; she’s
the wife of the longest-serving member of America’s highest
court, and a well-known lobbyist for conservative causes.Trump’s “flimsy” allegations of election fraud never made it as
far as the supreme court, said the Los Angeles Times, so we’ll
never know how Justice Thomas would have dealt with them.
But we do know that he was the lone voice of dissent when thecourt rejected Trump’s bid to block
the release of White House records
regarding the 6 January riot. Given his
wife’s views, he clearly has a conflict
of interest and should recuse himself
from any cases relating to the 2020
election or to 6 January.Poppycock, said Rich Lowry on
Politico. The law requires judges to
recuse themselves when they or their
spouse have “an interest that could be
substantially affected by the outcome
of the proceedings”. That’s not the
case here. Ginni Thomas isn’t party
to any election-related litigation. She’s
a private citizen who was giving advice to an official who may
or may not have heeded it. Since when did we hold judges to
account for the political views of their spouses? If spouses’
views were grounds for recusal, the nine-member court would
rarely be able to convene in full strength, said The Wall Street
Journal. That “may be precisely the result” that Democrats –
nervous of future supreme court rulings on issues such as
abortion and gun rights – want to achieve. “The Jan. 6
committee had no cause to leak Ginni Thomas’s texts other
than to embarrass her”, and to damage her husband. Justice
Thomas has “every right and reason” to ignore the ensuing fuss.Trouble at the supreme court: the case of the judge’s wife
Ginni Thomas with her husband, Clarence