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Pumping up Putin: Moscow’s little helper lends a hand

America has been disgraced by the Oval Office's current occupant in ways so numerous as to bring sands on the seashore to mind, but warranting special recognition is his relentless effort to sell Ukraine down the river. Since it invaded Crimea in 2014 and then with its full-scale invasion of ...

Iran exposes an intolerable U.S. vulnerability

Churchill said that "wars are not won by evacuations," and sometimes, he might have added, they are simply embarrassing. The U.S. hastily flew its B-1 bombers out of RAF Fairford in the U.K. for fear of a potential Iranian drone attack, the latest in a series of successful Iranian ...

We’re chasing significance in the wrong places

It seems like everyone wants to be a social media influencer these days. Researcher Matthew Simoneau surveyed middle and high school students from 2021 to 2024 and more than 60% of them said they wanted to be social media influencers. People think fame and fortune will make them happy. But ...

Does AI deserve human rights?

You can't be cruel to a toaster; inanimate objects don't feel pain. You can't be cruel to a computer program, either, even if programs like Microsoft Word often seem pretty cruel to us. Yet the artificial intelligence company Anthropic insists its product is different: Starting next month, users will be prohibited from "sustained and needless cruel and abusive behavior" toward Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude. Giving the machine a name was cute -- giving it human rights isn't. What Anthropic's leaders are up to is an attack on human dignity, and the anti-cruelty policy is part of ...

Let them eat cake — and candy, too

I fell into a net loop watching old commercials the other day, reminiscing with videos of escapist Calgon bubble baths, roving dog food chuck wagons and smiling folks settling into bed with "The Clapper." At one point, I stumbled on an ad more anachronistic than any of its contemporaries: a ...