Thursday, March 21, 2024

Dealing with the Loss of Technological Superiority

Dealing with the Loss of Technological Superiority


"The fall of an empire—the end of a polity, a socioeconomic order, a dominant culture, or the intertwined whole—looks more like a cascading series of minor, individually unimportant failures than a dramatic ending that appears out of the blue." Patrick Wyman


  1. Technological superiority naturally diminishes over time as technologies spread around the world.

  2. Cultural superiority, in some ways, is derived from technological superiority.

  3. Loss of technological superiority presents challenges:

    1. Capitalism and freedom move wealth and opportunity elsewhere (market)

    2. Centers of power and cultural status are dispersed (culture)

    3. Unequal laws and norms favoring the former powers are eliminated in favor of decentralized laws and norms (rules)

  4. Coping Mechanism - Focus on cultural superiority.  

    1. Greater acceptance of and integration of minorities and other cultures (cosmopolitanism) using lingering effects of former dominance (e.g. English language, banking system, pop culture).

    2. Greater relative rewards for cultural achievements which are slower to be disrupted by loss of technological superiority; e.g. managers v engineers

    3. Scapegoating/demonization of competition (Putin, Trump (also Xi, Modi, MBS, Khamenei, Orban)) as culturally backward rather than recognizing tradeoffs in focusing on minority rights and cosmopolitan values.  

  5. Downward Spiral

    1. Military overextension and impotence

    2. Commercial overextension and impotence

    3. Cosmopolitan political influences

    4. Detachment from reality due to scapegoating

    5. Reverse scapegoating and societal division.

    6. Internecine conflict and Information warfare

    7. Diminished cultural influence and soft power.


 

Monday, March 18, 2024

The Case Against Biden

The Case Against Biden


Executive Summary

The Biden Administration has been incontrovertibly wrong about the two biggest issues during his time as president.

  1. COVID-19

  2. War in Ukraine

Moreover, he has advanced false narratives in each of these matters to attack his political opponents, severely damaging democratic discourse and global civilization in general.

COVID-19

Covid-19 emerged from a US-funded lab in Wuhan China.  Rather than trying to deal with this constructively, the Biden Administration, in concert with the media and political establishment, has continued to deal with this as a partisan issue.  Jeffrey Sachs looks at the big picture in What Might the US Owe the World for Covid-19?:


A US-funded laboratory origin of Covid-19 would certainly constitute the most significant case of governmental gross negligence in history. The people of the world deserve transparency and factual answers on vital questions.  


The US government (USG) funded and supported a program of dangerous laboratory research that may have resulted in the creation and accidental laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the outbreak, the USG lied in order to cover up its possible role. The US Government should correct the lies, find the facts, and make amends with the rest of the world.

The Biden Administration inherited the highly partisan covid-19 situation.  However, he was elected as a highly partisan standard bearer, and so can not plausibly distance himself from responsibility.  Now that the worst of the pandemic has passed, the president needs to step up and lead an adult conversation about what happened and how to do better in the future.  If he cannot do this, then we should look for a leader who can and will.

War in Ukraine

The NATO war against Russia has had the exact opposite of its intended effect as advertised by the Biden Adminstration.  The purpose of the war was to weaken Russia and, especially, the administration of Vladimir Putin.  Putin just got reelected with support that western leaders can only dream of.  The moribund Russian military has been revitalizized. Hundreds of thousands of Russian troops have been mobilized and the industrial base of the Russian economy is churning out both high tech and low tech weapons at an unparalled pace.  Russia now has the taste of military success.  The Biden Administration led us into a losing war and now openly panic at the prospect of defeat.

Again, Biden was elected as the highly partisan standard bearer of the party that falsely blamed Putin and Russia for our domestic political dysfunciton.  We need leaders who are willing and able to confront of the truths surrounding our misbegotten adventure in Ukraine.

Additional Considerations?

There are other issues of course.  But none compare to global pandemic and global war.  Antitrust, minority rights, and environmental stewardship, for example, can not be dealt with constructively in the current social climate.  The establishment must stop demonizing Putin and Trump and instead must admit to its own mistakes.  We're seeing what happens when they double down on misinformation masquerading as "intelligence".


Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Our Fake Democracy

The pretense is pretty much gone.  U.S. elections are no more open and fair than are elections in Russia and China.  At the local level, money rules.  At the national level, alternatives are restricted to hose that are establishment approved.  Super Tuesday has come and gone without debate.  Nikki Haley was the only alternative permitted, and she is a puppet of the military intelligence establishment. 

No debate is permitted on the most important subject of war and peace.  Occasionally, public opinion surfaces in the form of Trump, Galloway, or Corbyn, but these alternatives are dismissed as not serious.  The real players know the truth which is not shared with the voters for national security reasons.

Democracy is a good aspirational value.  But let's not kid ourselves about the reality of our political existence.  

Monday, March 04, 2024

The Crime is Revealing the Truth

 So once again, the crime is in revealing the truth: Fall-out from the Bundeswehr scandal

But what exactly are the Germans going to investigate?  The breach of secret communications or the crime that the German government’s own officials were plotting? I would call it a ‘crime against humanity’ in the sense that their intended actions could lead to a world war and the end of civilization on earth.

Regrettably, from all appearances, it is only the first question that interests Herr Scholz, his associates in the coalition government and the Opposition, the Christian Democratic Union. That is what we find in The Financial Times online today in their article “Scholz promises inquiry after Russia publishes tapped military discussions.”  There is great consternation that the Russians have accessed what should have been maximally secure communications lines.  In its coverage today, Le Monde tells a similar story.

The New Domino Theory

Western politicians have been running around like a bunch of Chicken Littles lately screaming that Russia will soon be invoading all of Europe and the United States will be forced to send troops.  This is similar to the Domino Theory as weaponized in Vietnam except it is even less likely.  We are led by buffoons.

Communism was indeed advancing following World War II, and it was an aggressive ideology that claimed that its spread around the world was inevitable.  So there was some plausibility to these Domino Theory warnings that dominated the discourse during my youth in the 1960s.  Russia, on the other hand, has retreated massively and voluntarily in the past 35 years. It has no track record in this time of expanding and no ideology of expansion.  Only twice has it drawn the line -- in Georgia in 2008 and recently (2022) in Ukraine.  In these two instances Russia has intervened on the side of ethnic Russians in conditions of civil war.  There are just not very many other places in Europe with a lot of ethnic Russians, so further Russian military intervention is unlikely, especially far afield in places such as Germany.

There has been a sort of domino effect in the other direction.  Ever since Russia pulled back from the Cold War in 1989, the U.S.-led West has been advancing in Russia's direction, expanding the Western empire.  So it's not that the concept of cascading advances is fundamentally flawed.  Rather, the Domino Theory is used to blind us to other considerations including military strength, civilizational history, and practical politics.

Friday, March 01, 2024

Demonization of Putin

The U.S. intelligence services get away with murder.  The same is probably true of Russian intelligence services.  

I recently read a biography of Putin which was very critical, fitting in with Nancy Pelosi's "one of the most evil men in the world" characterization.  Yet one of the author's main criticism of Putin was that he didn't try to prosecute certain other Russians for crimes.  In other words, certain allied groups in Russia are above the law.  

Putin himself had been certain from the moment he was informed of Nemtsov’s murder that
night that it had been Kadyrov’s doing. The difficulty was what to do about it.
After previous political murders in which the Chechens had been implicated, including those
of Politkovskaya and Ruslan Yamadayev, another of Kadyrov’s opponents, who had been shot
dead when his car stopped at a traffic light in central Moscow in 2008, the killers themselves had
been arrested and sentenced to long prison terms but the investigators had made no attempt to
question those suspected of ordering the murders. Putin regarded Politkovskaya’s murder as
politically inept, but she had been a fierce critic of his regime and he cannot have been sorry to
see her silenced, even if he would have preferred it to happen in a different way. Yamadayev’s
killing had been an intra-Chechen affair, and in such matters he made it a principle not to get
involved.

After the President reappeared in public on March 16, he continued to refuse Kadyrov’s calls.
But the Chechen leader could play that game, too. Ten days later, he flew to Dubai, accompanied
by a large delegation, ostensibly to go to the races, in which some of his horses were running.
While there, he openly taunted Moscow. ‘Some media have even produced headlines, “Is the
Kremlin afraid of Chechnya?”’ he wrote. ‘This is a provocation … The Kremlin has nothing to
fear.’11 That hit very close to the bone. The liberal newspaper, Novaya gazeta, had written
earlier that month: ‘Power means the right to commit violence without punishment. The one
whose violence goes unpunished is the ruler. The murder of Boris Nemtsov suggests that Putin is
no longer the strongest man in Russia.’12

When Kadyrov returned, Putin made clear that he regarded the affair as closed

And yet, we in the West seem to see Putin as an all powerful dictator.  As with our own leaders, however, there are limits to his power.  We should not demonize Putin and the Russian system for the fact that such crimes occur, as the extralegal activity also happens in the West and is ignored by the political leaders.  The more important consideration is the extent to which extralegal activity occurs and is condoned.  From Stephen Cohen in 2018:

There’s an organization called the Committee to Protect American Journalists. It’s kind of iconic. It does good things, it says unwise things. Go on its website and look at the number of Russian journalists killed since 1991, since the end of the Soviet Union, under two leaders. Boris Yeltsin, whom we dearly loved and still mourn, and Putin, whom we hate. Last time I looked, the numbers may have changed, more were killed under Yeltsin than under Putin. Did Putin kill those in the 1990s?

So you should ask me, why did they die, then? And I can tell you the main reason. Corrupt business. Mafia-like business in Russia. Just like happened in the United States during our primitive accumulation days. Profit seekers killed rivals. Killed them dead in the streets. Killed them as demonstrations, as demonstrative acts. The only thing you could say about Putin is that he might have created an atmosphere that abets that sort of thing. To which I would say, maybe, but originally it was created with the oligarchical class under Boris Yeltsin, who remains for us the most beloved Russian leader in history. So that’s the long and the short of it. Go look at the listing on the Committee to Protect Journalists…

Similarly, Putin is demonized because the press and the political system is not entirely free in Russia.  Opposition figures are marginalized and not given access to the biggest platforms.  This happens everywhere to varying degrees including, of course, the United States.  My impression is that, as with extra judicial killings, Russia is not that much different from the West.  Russia is not the Soviet Union in this respect, and the Internet makes it much harder to keep a lid on the truth.  Many in the West have, ironically, come to the conclusion that populist "misinformation" is a big problem and have supported direct and indirect censorship of opposition figures and opinions.  There are sins on both sides, as well as legitimate restrictions, and the devil is in the details / extent of the sins.

I'll close with this Biblical quote from Matthew 7:3-5

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Jake Sullivan, Cold Blooded Liar or Weak Politician?

I saw an interview with Jake Sullivan on TV yesterday ("Meet the Press", I believe).  I was impressed by his ability to lie seriously and seemingly sincerely.  Just as he did in blaming Putin for the Nord Stream pipeline bombing, he doubled down on Russia/Putin having sabotaged the U.S. elections in 2016 and 2020.  Of course, we know that Russia did nothing of the sort.  Sullivan, most of all, must know since he was at the center of some of the erroneous claims:

That brings us to Sullivan.

As soon as the conspiracy theory was packaged and delivered to the FBI and the media by Sussman, the indictment recounts an exchange between some of those “VIPs”: “… on or about September 15, 2016, Campaign Lawyer-1 exchanged emails with the Clinton Campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that SUSSMANN had recently shared with Reporter-1.” The campaign lawyer reportedly was Elias, and the “foreign policy advisor” reportedly was Sullivan.

Sullivan was quoted in an official campaign press statement as stating that the Alfa Bank allegation “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.” In the statement, Sullivan said: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia … This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.”

The U.S. intelligence community ultimately rejected the Alfa Bank conspiracy. It also concluded that the Steele dossier not only relied on a suspected Russian agent but likely was used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation through the Clinton campaign.

Yet, when Sullivan was later questioned by Congress, he went full Sergeant Schultz, claiming he basically did not have a clue about the basis or origins of the Alfa Bank controversy or other campaign-orchestrated scandals. Sullivan was adept at laying qualifiers upon qualifiers to render statements useless: “broadly speaking, at some point in the summer, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, around the convention, I learned that there was an effort to do some research into the ties between Trump and Russia.” That will make any false statement claim difficult absent direct involvement in the planning of these “campaign efforts.”

Sullivan denied knowing that Elias or Sussman were working for the Clinton campaign, despite numerous news articles identifying Elias as the campaign’s general counsel. Sullivan just shrugged and said: “To be honest with you, Marc wears a tremendous number of hats, so I wasn’t sure who he was representing. I sort of thought he was, you know, just talking to us as, you know, a fellow traveler in this — in this campaign effort.”

That seems odd, given Sullivan’s long, close involvement with Clinton and her campaigns. He advised her during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and later became her deputy chief of staff and policy planning director at the State Department. He was one of the notable names in Clinton’s email scandal and the recipient of her controversial order to strip the classification headings on a key email.  He later rejoined Clinton again during the 2016 campaign as one of her senior-most advisers.

Yet, the lack of disclosure over those behind the “campaign effort” seems suspiciously consistent. Sussman was indicted for allegedly hiding his representation of Clinton in pushing the Alfa Bank conspiracy. Elias was accused of doing the same with reporters on the Steele Dossier. He also reportedly sat next to campaign chair John Podesta when he denied such connections to Congress. Now Sullivan denies any knowledge of the campaign’s early role in these scandals.

It is notable that, when Sullivan was the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy adviser, President Obama was given a national security briefing of Clinton’s alleged plan to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” That briefing was on July 28, 2016 — three days before the Russia investigation was initiated.

Upon reflection, it seems to me that Sullivan is not particularly unique within the United States political establishment.  He lies routinely and matter of factly about the most important issues because everybody does and everybody gets away with it.  Meanwhile, the country is hopelessly divided.  Whatever Trump's faults, he's not wrong about the Democrats.  Should we be surprised about the state of our democracy? 

Mocking "Putin's Unprovoked War"

 "Our democracy" has distinct Fascist characteristics, two of which can be found in the phrase "Putin's Unprovoked War", which has been routinely used by the New York Times to characterize the Ukraine/NATO Russia.  

  • Demonizes enemy ("Putin", in this case)

  • Big lie ("unprovoked")


Sunday (2/25/2024), the New York Times unashamedly published The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, with the subtitle: For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.

The C.I.A.’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014… The government’s new spy chief… went to an office and called the C.I.A. station chief and the local head of MI6. It was near midnight but he summoned them to the building, asked for help in rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership. “That’s how it all started,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said… a C.I.A. supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border… Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)  And the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.

See also How Monsters Who Beat Jews To Death in 1944 Became America’s Favorite “Freedom Fighters” in 1945.

As Hannah Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism: 

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.


Our leaders, including the mainstream media, lie gratuitously and carelessly.  We've been in an open proxy war with Russia for 2 years, and now the NY Times casually announces that there has been an active spy war going on since 2014, involving secret bases along the Ukraine/Russia border, spies inside Russia, and commando forces.  What kind of democracy is this where the voters know nothing about the most important facts underlying our march to war?  Informing the voters is an afterthought, delivered by the same news outlet that has consistently delivered the big lies.


Thursday, January 11, 2024

Power Struggle

I’ve been reading the NY Times (headlines only), and the focal points of attention seem to have changed. There is now rarely anything about Putin or Ukraine, and when there is it is often more critical of U.S. policy. For example, there is one headline today mentioning Ukraine: U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine Was Poorly Tracked, Pentagon Report Concludes. There are also articles indicating the military-intelligence establishment is divided internally. Here’s one from Newsweek from last July: Exclusive: The CIA’s Blind Spot about the Ukraine War. From this trend I’ve concluded that the neocons have lost clout.

What I do see in the NY Times headlines is many articles every day about Trump. From the tone of these headlines, I’ve concluded that the establishment’s main goal in the coming year is to defeat Trump and his fellow travellers. This power struggle is now the main focus. I tend to think that the establishment will be successful in defeating Trump and tightening its grip on the institutions which wield power. Perhaps we’ll get a President DeSantis or Gavin Newsom, or 4 more years of Biden, any of which would be acceptable to the powers that be. The important thing is to maintain the status quo with regard to power. And this is not totally unreasonable, considering that Trump is currently the only serious alternative. There is much wrong with our institutions, but we shouldn’t let them fall apart. (Although we've seen that Trump wasn't able to have much of an impact upon our institutions.)

On the other hand, it seems that democracy will continue to suffer. Defeating Trump will come via lawfare and other heavy handed tactics, and the problems which gave rise to Trump will not have gone away. My hope is that the next administration eventually feel secure enough from the populist threat that they will come to embrace needed change.

Dealing with the Loss of Technological Superiority

Dealing with the Loss of Technological Superiority "The fall of an empire—the end of a polity, a socioeconomic order, a dominant cultur...