Miscellaneous

Leaked Documents and Games Within Games

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The news last week that there was a leak of highly classified US intelligence documents
concerning Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran is the stuff for spy thrillers, but a perusal of the various media accounts leaves several questions unanswered.

1) The documents were posted on Telegram by an account of the pro-Iranian “Middle East Spectator.” What exactly is the relationship between the Spectator and the Iranian regime?

2) How did the Spectator receive the documents? Was it a leak from a US intelligence source as claimed or via hack?

3) The Spectator reported two documents that were leaked. Were there more?

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The Cuban Missile Crisis, as Viewed From a Soviet Launch Facility (rerun)

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This month marks the 62nd anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world dangerously close to thermonuclear war. Reflecting on this crisis seems particularly appropriate in our current era, when the threat of nuclear war has again come forward from the background to which it had been hopefully consigned. More countries now possess or are on track to possess nuclear weapons, and some of them are ruled by very malevolent people and true fanatics.

Several years ago,  I read  Rockets and People, the totally fascinating memoir of Soviet rocket developer Boris Chertok, which I reviewed  here.  Chertok’s career encompassed both military and space-exploration projects, and in late October 1962 he was focused on preparations for launching a Mars probe.

On the morning of Oct 27, he was awakened by “a strange uneasiness.” After a quick breakfast, he headed for the missile assembly building, known as the MIK.

At the gatehouse, there was usually a lone soldier on duty who would give my pass a cursory glance. Now suddenly I saw a group of soldiers wielding sub-machine guns, and they thoroughly scrutinized my pass. Finally they admitted me to the facility grounds and there, to my surprise, I again saw sub-machine-gun-wielding soldiers who had climbed up the fire escape to the roof of the MIK. Other groups of soldiers in full combat gear, even wearing gas masks, were running about the periphery of the secure area. When I stopped in at the MIK, I immediately saw that the “duty” R-7A combat missile, which had always been covered and standing up against the wall, which we had always ignored, was uncovered.

Chertok was greeted by his friend Colonel Kirillov, who was in charge of this launch facility. Kirollov did not greet Chertok with his usual genial smile, but with a “somber, melancholy expression.”

Without releasing my hand that I’d extended for our handshake, he quietly said: “Boris Yevseyevich, I have something of urgent importance I must tell you”…We went into his office on the second floor. Here, visibly upset, Kirillov told me: “Last night I was summoned to headquarters to see the chief of the [Tyura-Tam] firing range. The chiefs of the directorates and commanders of the troop units were gathered there. We were told that the firing range must be brought into a state of battle readiness immediately. Due to the events in Cuba, air attacks, bombardment, and even U.S. airborne assaults are possible. All Air Defense Troops assets have already been put into combat readiness. Flights of our transport airplanes are forbidden. All facilities and launch sites have been put under heightened security. Highway transport is drastically restricted. But most important—I received the order to open an envelope that has been stored in a special safe and to act in accordance with its contents. According to the order, I must immediately prepare the duty combat missile at the engineering facility and mate the warhead located in a special depot, roll the missile out to the launch site, position it, test it, fuel it, aim it, and wait for a special launch command. All of this has already been executed at Site No. 31. I have also given all the necessary commands here at Site No. 2. Therefore, the crews have been removed from the Mars shot and shifted over to preparation of the combat missile. The nosecone and warhead will be delivered here in 2 hours

Chertok, who at this point was apparently viewing the Cuban affair as a flash in the pan that would be resolved short of war, was concerned that moving the Mars rocket would cause them to miss their October 29 launch date, and suggested that the swap of the rockets be delayed for a few hours. Kirillov told him that this was impossible, and that he should go to the “Marshal’s cottage,” where some of his associates wanted to see him. Chertok’s response:

Yes, sir! You’re in charge! But, Anatoliy Semyonovich! Just between you and me do you have the courage to give the ‘Launch!’ command, knowing full well that this means not just the death of hundreds of thousands from that specific thermonuclear warhead, but perhaps the beginning of the end for everyone? You commanded a battery at the front, and when you shouted  ‘Fire!’  that was quite another matter.

Kirillov:

There’s no need to torment me. I am a soldier now; I carry out an order just as I did at the front. A missile officer just like me, not a Kirillov, but some Jones or other, is standing at a periscope and waiting for the order to give the ‘Launch’ command against Moscow or our firing range. Therefore, I advise you to hurry over to the cottage.

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Ackman’s Choice

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Bill Ackman, founder/CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has written a long and thoughtful piece (at X)  on his reasons for supporting Donald Trump in the upcoming election. This piece, which may be the first of several, focuses on what Ackman sees as the actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for his losing total confidence in the administration and the Party.  Since there are many people who are not on X,  I am reproducing his entire post below the break.

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CBS and Objectivity

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CBS has had an interesting week. First there was the interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Tony Dokoupil regarding Coates’ book “The Message.” Dokoupil treated Coates well, like a Republican, in that he asked some pointed questions about Coates’ book; his claim Israel was a white supremacist ethnostate akin to the Jim Crow South, that he treated Palestinians exclusively as victims without agency, and that he failed to state how Israel was surrounded by enemies pledged to destroy it.

Tough, but civil…. and then all heck broke loose

Apparently the morning show staff was so traumatized by the interview that CBS held a struggle session the next day. One of the criticisms that was hurled at Dokoupil was that he ignored the “one-sheet:”

”…the network went through its standard protocol of vetting questions through its legal, standards, and race and culture departments. The properly vetted questions were then included on what’s known as a ‘one-sheet,’ from which everyone within the show works.”

It’s standard protocol to vet questions through a race and culture department?

The other controversy at CBS came from the 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris where CBS not only cut out an unflattering clip of Kamala that it had previously released as a preview, but when challenged released a “transcript” that left out the verbiage from the previously released video clip. That’s some pretty awesome memory holing.

So what about objectivity?

Objectivity as a guiding value of journalism emerged in the 1890s as a reaction to yellow journalism. Objectivity was the idea that if a journalist simply dug out and ordered the facts the truth would emerge naturally, a way of freeing the writer from cultural and personal bias.

Walter Lippman, capturing the contemporary spirit of applying scientific tools to the social sphere, made an explicit appeal to reporters to develop a rigorous journalistic method based on verification of evidence. Objectivity would lie in the method and practice of journalism, not within the journalist himself.

This “objectivity” has been a hallowed symbol of American journalism for nearly a century. Cronkite might not have meant it when said “And that’s the way it is,” but even as a hypocrite he was still restrained by that tether to the symbol of objectivity.

Even the CBS chainsawing (editing is too polite a word) of the Kamala Harris interview, while repugnant, we can at least recognize as just good old partisan corruption. This is something Dan Rather can appreciate.

Well, now even the pretense of that tether is gone. If the Obama years didn’t do it, then certainly the last eight years of Trump Derangement Syndrome have allowed the liberal part of the media to let its freak flag fly and cut ties with “objectivity.” In their 2023 report, “Beyond Objectivity”, Leonard Downie and Andrew Heyward interviewed 75 news leaders, journalists, and other media experts in order to to investigate the new landscape of media values and practices.

Some choice parts…

Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press:

“…said she has not used the word objectivity since the early 1970s because she believes it reflects the world view of the male white establishment. ‘It’s objective by whose standards? And that standard seems to be white, educated, fairly wealthy guys,’ she explained.”

Sally Buzbee, former executive editor of the Washington Post:

“Yet, Buzbee no longer uses the word objectivity ‘because it has become a political football. If the term objectivity means the world view of middle-aged white men, it has become attacked as a word that is used to keep the status quo.”

Saeed Ahmed, former director of digital news at NPR:

“As a journalist of color, I have been told time and again that my identity doesn’t matter, that I have to shed it all to worship at the altar of objectivity,” said Ahmed, “I bristle at that notion. My lived experiences should inform what I cover.”

There are a number of dimensions in here.

The first is the standard DEI mantra of equating a certain percentage of racial/gender/LGBT+ identities in their newsroom with a diversity of viewpoints.

The second is that since “objectivity” was a concept associated with a certain identity, being white men, that it should be discarded in favor of each person pursuing what they considered their version of the truth as it relates to their personal identity.

So far, this should not surprise anyone.

The third dimension is the most critical part, what happens (or doesn’t) when each individual pursues their own version of “truth.”

The 20th Century German mathematician Kurt Gödel stated that even though a system may be consistent, its consistency cannot be demonstrated within the system. Such a result does not imply that it is impossible to prove the consistency of a system, but only that such a proof cannot be accomplished inside the system itself, but rather it needs an external frame of reference.

Taking Gödel a further step, there are two types of consistency; that of consistency of the concept and the consistency of the match-up between observed reality and the concept’s description of reality. This is also known as the distinction between a reliable and a valid argument. To put it plainly that means an argument that is internally consistent (reliable) could also be externally inconsistent (invalid) because it fails to match with an external frame of reference (what most of us call reality). Anybody who has dealt with a smooth talker in sales or politics has experienced this intuitively.

What Downie, Hayward, and all the people they interview have done is essentially jettison objectivity as an external frame of reference, deriding it as a socially constructed reality (of white men), in favor of a “diverse” system of identity-based viewpoints. However, since the “truths” of those diverse viewpoints are rooted within the individual there is no basis, by definition, of validating them by an external frame of reference. This is the essence of nihilism and post-modernism, that there is no external truth but rather the old cliché of “my truth” through which the external world must be observed.

The Dokoupil-Coates interview, the struggle session that followed, the existence of a “Race and Culture Unit” represent this repudiation of objectivity. There is no truth at CBS beyond one’s individual feelings as represented by their chosen identity.

This is of course an unstable equilibrium. People in social endeavors from polities to workplaces, run on some form of common understanding, a frame of reference external to the individual. People as individuals also form their understanding of the larger social and physical environment through interacting with it. People, like Gödel’s arguments, need some grounding in an external frame of reference. When Chesterton said, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything,” he might have meant it as a curse but really it is psychological reality.

So the issue becomes, if “objectivity” is no longer the dominant approach or ideology of the newsroom, by definition there needs to be an external frame of reference, another organizing principle, for that organization to function. It cannot exist on individual truths because those are by definition outside of the scope of social interaction. There has to be something else.

For the po-mos truth outside of the individual is socially constructed (Downie and Hayward are so far out of their depth at this point, they are just along for the ride). If you believe, as most post-modernists do, that social relations are racially or gender-constructed and therefore oppressive by nature, that means somebody is going to get the chop. As Lenin put it the struggle between oppressor and oppressed is eternal, it’s simply matter of who is doing what to whom at a certain point in time.

So in reality, what CBS means by vetting through its “Race and Culture Unit” is that the network doesn’t report the news any more, or even just support Democrats, but has chosen sides in a revolutionary struggle.

For CBS it is all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. CBS had won the victory over itself. It loved the world beyond Objectivity. It was free.

Redefining Hypocrisy

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There is a value to hypocrisy. La Rochefoucauld is purported to have said, “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

To be clear, hypocrisy is not in and of itself virtuous — just the opposite as it is a serious sin. However, hypocrisy is not nihilism, because by definition hypocrisy implies a recognition of an external moral order. That recognition provides both validation of that existing order, and a tether which ties the hypocrite’s behavior to it and therefore restricts the extent of public deviation.

There is another element to hypocrisy. If we can further define hypocrisy as the difference between public image and private behavior, then scandal is when that deviant private behavior is publicly exposed.

Then we have Doug Emhoff, a.k.a. Mr. Kamala Harris.

As a politician’s spouse, Emhoff has two roles to fulfill. The first is to be supportive of his wife’s career and the second is not to draw negative attention to himself. This is especially important given Kamala’s national profile and her progressive politics.

Sometimes these roles come into conflict. Some First Ladies (Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan) have taken an active and fairly public role in their respective husbands’ administrations and drawn heat. However, that is different than being a personal embarrassment. We have presidents’ brothers (Jim Biden, Billy Carter) and kids (Hunter Biden) who were personal embarrassments, but as of yet there haven’t been any spouses. (1)

Then we have Emhoff.

There has been a lot of ink spilled over the past month or two about how Emhoff has “reshaped the perception of masculinity” given his marriage with Kamala. There was the fawning interview he did last year with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart when Emhoff stated : (2)

“There’s too much of toxicity — masculine toxicity out there, and we’ve kind of confused what it means to be a man, what it means to be masculine. You’ve got this trope out there where you have to be tough, and angry, and lash out to be strong.”

Oh my.

A few months ago there was the revelation that Emhoff had, during his first marriage, impregnated the family nanny. Then a few weeks ago we had the story about how he struck a woman on a street in France. Now we have allegations from former co-workers regarding his misogynist behavior at his law firm. (3)

I don’t know about you but where I come from cheating on your wife with the family help, hitting women, and engaging in sexual harassment in the workplace pretty much define toxic masculinity.

So, back to the definition above, we now have a scandal, not just with Emhoff’s actual behavior but in the Harris campaign’s use of him as a symbol of the “New Man” — implicitly contrasting him with the mouth-breathing Christian nationalists.

Emhoff’s private behavior is between him and his wife. However, when a false image of Emhoff is created, and then weaponized to be used in politics, it becomes a public matter and hypocrisy loses its last vestiges of public value.

(1) I didn’t use Hillary as an example of someone whose conduct detracted from their spouse, because she was in full partnership with Bill.

(2) There’s a documentary to be made regarding Jen Psaki. This was someone who spent 16 months as the press secretary for the Biden puppet show. Then there was the unprecedented conflict of interest when she announced that she was leaving for a gig at MSNBC, but then delayed her departure for weeks. And now she does what amounts to a campaign commercial with Doug Emhoff?

(3) I heard some scuttlebutt a few years ago that there were some skeletons in Emhoff’s past. L.A. lawyer, entertainment industry, would seem to raise questions. It never ceases to amaze me that people who rise to a high level think they can just escape their past. You would think that at some point, at least by the time of the Psaki interview, Emhoff might had let on about his past deeds. It leads me to conclude that the Harris campaign wasn’t paying attention, or didn’t care because they were desperate enough to risk it. Never underestimate desperation.