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Iran War Chokepoints Begin to Cast Doubt on Global Chip Supply
Trump’s Demand for Hormuz Support Faces Resistance
Watch: Trump Demands Help with Hormuz, US Attacks Kharg Island
Monday, March 16, 2026
Headline Clippings | Bloomberg
MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: in the age of algorithmic targeting.
These AI providers are at the cutting edge of the military-industrial
complex, and should be regulated as such. A clear accountability chain
applies to firms such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin – entailing export
controls, congressional oversight, liability frameworks and procurement
conditions – whereas the weak regulations that apply to the companies
writing the algorithms that select military targets have never been
applied, tested or enforced.
Lifting the fog of war
We should stop calling these technology companies and start calling them what they are: defense contractors.
". . .There is an Israeli military strategy called the “fog procedure”. First used during the second intifada, it’s an unofficial rule that requires soldiers guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be lurking.
It’s violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.
Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war” – the first war in which AI systems have played a central role in generating Israel’s list of purported Hamas and Islamic jihad militants to target. Systems that processed billions of data points to rank the probability that any given person in the territory was a combatant.
The darkness in the watchtower was a condition of the terrain. The darkness inside the algorithm is a condition of the design. In both cases, the blindness was chosen. It was chosen because blindness is useful: it creates deniability, it makes the violence feel inevitable, it moves the question of who decided from a person to a procedure. The fog did not lift. It was given a probability score and called intelligence.
SUBJECT; Interpretation is A Misreading
The
term “culture wars” is most often associated with issues of sexuality,
race, religion, and gender. But, as recent months have made plain, when Donald Trump refers to the culture wars, he also means the arts.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
with David Remnick
Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.
Donald Trump’s War on Culture Is Not a Sideshow
- He fired the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Republicans want to rename for him.
- His Administration fired the national archivist and the Librarian of Congress, and pressured the director of the National Portrait Gallery to resign;
- It is reviewing the entire Smithsonian Institution, looking for what the President calls “improper ideology.”
But Adam Gopnik
believes that interpretation is a misreading.
The loyalty purge at
institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery is a key part of his
agenda.
“Pluralism is the key principle of a democratic culture,”
----Gopnik
tells David Remnick.
Could we be following the path of Stalinist
Russia, where a head of state dictated reviews of concerts, Remnick
asks?
“I pray and believe that we are not. But that is certainly the
direction in which one inevitably heads when the political boss takes
over key cultural institutions, and dictates who’s acceptable and who is
not.” Gopnik recalls saying after the election that “Jimmy Kimmel and
Stephen Colbert would be next.” “You would see them disappear,” he
added. “Each time, we find a rationale for it or a rationale is offered.
And it’s much easier for us to swallow the rationale than to face the
reality.”
New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Sunday, March 15, 2026
Over-Sized Florsheim Fetish
Trump's Wild War Game
If you want to understand where we are at this moment in Trump’s second administration, all you have to do is look at that picture of Marco Rubio wearing a pair of oversized Florsheim shoes. This footwear, the WSJ revealed, is Trump’s go-to gift for members of his inner circle, to whom he wishes to show approbation.
He determines the shoe size by rough instinct and, 24 hours later, a pair of $145 leather oxfords, the proud badge of political servility, arrives.
We are in Uganda’s Idi Amin territory now. I dream of the cabinet meeting when Trump is finally pelted with Florsheims, like that glorious moment in 2008 when the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference with Iraqi puppet PM al-Maliki in Baghdad. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, dog!” shouted Muntadhar, before he was wrestled to the ground and thrown into jail. (“I don’t know what his beef is,” commented Bush, who lacked imagination at the best of times.)
The unsettling thing is, we are all wearing Florsheims now. Not because we lack raucous expressions of dissent at the manner in which America lurched into a war of choice with Iran, but because we all keep pretending there is a functioning alternative reality in which norms, policy, think tanks, and geopolitical game plans still play their traditional roles.
Pundits speak sonorously about “regime modification” (shorthand for a next-gen, turban-charged Islamic republic) and the “extension of presidential power,” as if this were the long-ago world of institutional gravitas and coequal branches of government, instead of an inescapable escape room, in which we are trapped with a berserk brontosaurus peddling vehement ignorance.
We
nod away as former military brass with their flat procedural voices
outline the latest wheeze from the White House about special ops forces
extracting canisters of enriched uranium from the rubble of Iran’s
nuclear facilities without getting blown up.
- The sudden notion of resurgent Kurds has already come and gone from the news cycle.
- Trump, who hasn’t even flown commercial since circa 1988, is contemptuous of mariners and shipping companies who are hesitant to set sail on the perilous Strait of Hormuz, now seething with mines and drones.
- “These ships should go through…and show some guts. There’s nothing to be afraid of,”
- The truth is Trump’s Iran high is already wearing off.
- He all but yawned to reporters on Monday,
- “We want a system that can lead to many years of peace, and if we can’t have that, we might as well get it over with right now.”
- On to Cuba.
Jus’ the Facts
Didn’t
MAGA vote for Trump to end foreign “forever” wars?
Yes, but Iran has
been marketed to them as a series of hot-shit video game explosions.
Still, no one likes this war. Just as no one likes the excesses of ICE.
And no one likes the price of coffee and beef.
But it’s only MS NOW
hosts who think Trump is in a panic about his underwater polling.
- The Dems are betting that MAGA will soon demand a reckoning for his broken promises, but all the evidence is that Trump doesn’t care.
- “MAGA loves everything I do,” he told House Republicans at a retreat this week at his Doral golf resort.
- “MAGA is me.”
- It’s lonely being king.
When social media feeds provide your very own
bespoke bullshit, it’s almost impossible to be educated by the truth.
Thank God for the rigor of NYT and other journalists who combed through
surveillance videos of the girls’ school bombing in southern Iran.
After
Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who looks more like a
mendacious milkmaid every day, insisted that it was “propaganda” that
the U.S. may be responsible, these digital sloggers revealed the gutting
evidence.
Meanwhile,
America’s deluded hope that someone in the White House has an
explicable plan is a form of national self-soothing. My own personal
teething ring is General Dan “stay-in-my-own-lane” Caine’s regular
briefings.
- There was an unexpectedly lyrical moment in Tuesday’s update when the Joint Chiefs’ chair departed from his dry military-speak to conjure up the reality of this war in the person of young, yellow-shirted sailors on the flight decks of aircraft carriers in the Gulf region.
- Beside him, the pumped-up War Sec didn’t realize Caine’s words were a subtle demolition of Hegseth’s manufactured machismo and the dangerous chimera of a push-button war.
“Just for a minute, imagine you’re standing on that aircraft carrier flight deck,” said Caine. “There’s 30 knots of wind in your face. The deck is slippery, covered in grease. It’s noisy. There are propellers spinning. There’s jet blast everywhere. The helicopters are running. Your head is on a swivel and you’re trying to direct a multi-million dollar fighter into a one-foot square box so that those naval aviators can be shot off into the black of night to go do America’s work.”
America’s work. Remember that?
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