“Yemen’s Houthis,” Euronews reports, “have assured Washington that they would not attack US vessels in the Red Sea, following reports that the US cancelled its planned strikes on the group at the last minute, a senior Houthi official said on Monday” (September 21).

For more than a decade, the US has periodically thrown in with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in its attempts to conquer Yemen and impose rule by “the internationally recognized government,” a Riyadh-based, Saudi-funded puppet regime, usually on the justification that the Houthis are an “Iran-backed” movement and government.

For more than a decade, the Houthis —  formally known as Ansar Allah — have ruled a smaller amount of territory, but a far larger percentage of the country’s population, than that “internationally recognized government,” and recently launched a successful offensive to seize more, and more strategically important, territory. That new territory comprises key points on the coast of, and islands in, the Red Sea around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

If Iran’s near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a knife to international oil shipping’s throat, Houthi control of the Bab el-Mandeb is a firm grip on international oil shipping’s testicles.

US president Donald Trump, it seems, would rather the Houthis didn’t squeeze. Or maybe he’s just trying to conserve limited military resources for continued war with Iran.

Either way, when Saudi terror kingpin … er, Crown Prince … Mohammed bin Salman requested a new round of US airstrikes, the answer was “no, not this time.”

And either way, that’s the right answer.

The conflict in Yemen has never been any business of the US government’s, and continued US military support of the Saudi regime, going at least as far back as Desert Storm in 1991, has always been a disaster for America.

Among other blowback: In 2016, declassified information established that some of the attackers were materially supported by the Saudi royal family.

I’m not going to try to tell you that Ansar Allah make for “better” governors  of the Yemeni population than some Saudi quisling (I’m an anarchist — do the math). That’s a decision for the Yemeni population to make.

But if we’re going to put up with political government over here, Thomas Jefferson laid out the best foreign policy for that government to pursue: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Thanks to president Trump for veering toward that course, this time and on this issue. More, please.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Concerning AI,” US president Donald Trump  asked on Truth Social in mid-September, “when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

The answer, of course, is “never.”

When “industry leaders” start advocating for government regulation — or even, initially, for industry-internal “standards” bodies leading to such regulation — they’re not riding to the rescue of humankind, they’re looking out for their own bottom lines.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen rising public moral panic about the energy demands and environmental effects of AI data centers. While I can’t prove it, my perception is that the panic was algorithmically encouraged by, if not entirely created by, the same social media platforms that just happen to be operated by big players in AI.

Then, in mid-September, a sequence of events quickly unfolded that seemed pretty clearly artificial and contrived:

A researcher at Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, resigned, stating that the big players in AI are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Following Coxon’s resignation, Anthropic’s “Alignment Science Lead,” Evan Hubinger, commented that “[w]e really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

Within days — almost as if they’d just been waiting for a great news hook to roll their plans out for public consumption! — “industry leaders” moved from mildly asserting the desirability of an AI “standards” body (explicitly framed around a need for government to catch up with mandatory regulation) to openly coordinating with each other on forming such a body.

On September 18, four “paying subscribers” to AI services filed suit (seeking class action status) against Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google. The suit claims collusion between the firms, in violation of US antitrust laws, to establish “industry-wide coordination” that would “pace the frontier” of AI, slowing down its evolution (and thus depriving the public of whatever benefits that evolution might bring).

I’m not a big fan of antitrust law, but the case for collusion does look pretty strong, and that collusion really seems aimed at getting the US government to impose uniform and strict regulations on the development of artificial intelligence.

Why?

To keep new competitors — ambitious startups, smaller existing firms looking for new revenue centers, etc. — from entering the industry in the first place.

Those big industry players are already entrenched. They’ve established huge leads in building out AI infrastructure. They’ve already got the money and manpower in place to comply with such regulations.

Joe Blow, who just wrote some killer code at his desk, code to power a new kind of AI model running on a server in his garage, doesn’t have a data center to move his great idea onto.

He doesn’t have a major law firm on retainer to make sure his idea doesn’t violate any of the many government regulations that will inevitably evolve from the proposed “industry standards.”

And once those regulations are in place, he’ll have trouble raising enough investment capital to buy membership in a corporate club with a big “NO DOGS OR ENTREPRENEURS” sign on its door.

At best, Joe Blow might get one of those club members interested enough to hire him or buy his work product. More likely his big idea will just wither away and die.

That’s what the defendants in the lawsuit are really after: A shared monopoly.

Will AI kill all humans? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s either impossible or inevitable.

If it’s impossible, it’s nothing to worry about.

If it’s inevitable, all US government regulation — or “industry standards” — can accomplish is depriving Americans of the benefits of the most advanced AIs until the literal “killer app” emerges from Beijing or Bengaluru or Budapest.

Let’s not allow moral panic to deprive us of those benefits just so a few would-be monopolists can make bank.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On September 16, US Representative Mike Johnson (R-LA), acting in his role as Speaker of the House, sent that body’s members home until after the November midterm elections.

My knee-jerk reaction is gratitude. After all, as Gideon J. Tucker wrote in 1866, “no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

Conversely, if all those members of Congress are back home campaigning for re-election (or just enjoying a break), their opportunities to engage in criminal stupidity step down from wholesale to retail levels.

Heck, if we have to put up with Congress existing at all, I’d rather they convened once a year to collect their salaries for the year, then took the other 364 days off.

On a closer look, though, Johnson seems to have found a way to turn Tucker’s aphorism on its head, frequently using the absence of Congress to protect existing depredations, rather than the presence of Congress to drum up new ones.

“The House has now canceled at least 63 scheduled voting days this Congress, including nine days this month alone,” notes US Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC).

When Johnson thinks he’s going to lose a vote — with “lose” defined as upsetting or defying president Donald Trump — he just sends everyone home until he can whip a few more House members into line, or at least until the loss might come at a slightly less embarrassing point in the news cycle.

He’s done it with votes on EPA regulations.

He’s done it with votes related to the Epstein files.

This time he fled in terror, taking the entire House with him, from a privileged motion filed by outgoing US Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY).

The resolution, if passed, would have impeached US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for “Waging War in Contravention of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 …. Ignoring Laws that Minimize Civilian Casualties …. Extrajudicial Killings …. Suppressing Free Speech …. Kidnapping of a Sovereign Foreign Leader …. [and] Unlawful War in Yemen.”

Letting the House vote on the resolution would have been a no-win situation for Johnson and his party given that every House seat is up for election in a month-and-a-half.

If it had failed, Republican candidates would have had to explain to voters why they supported keeping a corrupt, incompetent crook in charge of the US armed forces.

If it had passed, Republican candidates would have had to explain to voters why they had left that corrupt, incompetent crook in charge of the US armed forces for nearly two years before taking steps to remove him.

While I doubt the House and Senate possess the moral fiber and testicular fortitude to send Hegseth packing (preferably all the way to The Hague), they’re a lot more likely to do so on November 4, when the next election is two years away and voters have time to forget all about it.

Ultimately, though, Hegseth and the House are simpatico — crooked peas in a crooked pod. As Mark Twain noted, “there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY