“Much of the media focus in the past year has been on Ukraine’s need for weapons and ammunition,” Max writes, but Andrey Liscovich identified the nonlethal equipment that forces needed and began a nongovernmental organization to source it. Already, he has supplied drones, satellite imagery, batteries and radio sensors.
Just as in Silicon Valley, he told Max, “You don’t ask them what the solution should be; you offer them a solution and ask their reaction.” That’s how Liscovich found himself on his current mission: figuring out how to ship U.S. school buses refitted as mobile command (and shower!) facilities.
It’s not just Ukraine that would benefit from lots of creative thinking. War, generally, could use a little more of the Silicon sensibility.
Bina Venkataraman’s latest column focuses on the applications of AI and other advanced technologies in war. She surveys Ukraine (and beyond) and sees land mines still killing brutally and indiscriminately. Isn’t that a sign we should be asking more of our technology?
“Before betting on specific tools,” she writes, “… political and military leaders, technologists and the rest of us should ask what is needed to reduce the humanitarian costs of war, and the suffering in its aftermath.”
Chaser: Three Ukraine experts break down where things stand — in terms of aid, territory, budget, refugee displacement, international rhetoric — in your all-you-need-to-know war dashboard.
More ethics, more problems
The case for stricter ethics requirements for the Supreme Court has been well made. But in the United States, everyone is constitutionally entitled to an advocate — and that includes the devil.
Jason Willick bucks the consensus in his column arguing that “a new internal compliance bureaucracy at the Supreme Court, foisted on it by Congress” would do more harm than good.
He writes that justices can already be held to account, via impeachment, and that they’re meant to be independent anyway. Any incursion on that, however modest-seeming at first, could easily lead to more muscular meddling.
Besides, the status quo is fine, actually! We all trust, humor columnist Alexandra Petri writes, in the current ethics code of “Don’t worry about it!”
“Maybe an ethics code is more of a journey than a destination,” she writes. “Not the kind of journey we would need to disclose, the other kind.”
From David Byler’s column explaining how small-dollar donations — meant to be the savior of democracy — have actually made things worse.
Think how individual Democrats spend: on feel-good lost causes such as Amy McGrath or a Marjorie Taylor Greene challenger. And think how individual Republicans spend: on red-meat bomb throwers such as Matt Gaetz or, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Small donations, David writes, make politics more like the internet: “hospitable to trolls, indulgent of political fantasy and deeply exhausting.” And the cherry on top? They don’t even really cut into big donations’ dominance.
Chaser: Speaking of, David also recently explained how megadonors circumvent campaign finance laws to cut huge checks. He’s got a solution for this one.
We hear a lot about how nominating Donald Trump is the only surefire way Republicans can lose the 2024 presidential election. But contributing columnist Ramesh Ponnuru is looking at the race from a different angle: He thinks President Biden is the only Democrat who could beat Trump.
Ramesh has read through the lines of Biden’s campaign talk about wanting to “finish the job” and gets that the president means keeping Trump out of the White House. He doesn’t blame Biden for thinking he has the best shot of anyone to do that, because the alternative Democrats are less popular, less cogent and do a worse job holding together a coalition that is “unwieldy and … in flux.”
Chaser: Columnist Colbert King is increasingly certain of a 2020 rematch. While Trump’s legal troubles might remain unresolved, the election will be his ultimate judgment day.
- To stop intelligence leaks, columnist David Ignatius argues, we must assume there will be bad actors and act accordingly.
- The Editorial Board cheers several high-profile universities’ pushback against left-wing students veering into censoriousness.
- Before hosting trashy TV, Jerry Springer was a thoughtful Midwestern politician. That’s who contributing columnist Gary Abernathy will remember.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.
I don’t know — I’m skeptical
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
