Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Elon Musk, at X:
To which physicist David Deutsch replied:
In terms of the causal power of information, the sun is trivially simple and ineffective compared with humans.
And I am reminded of some lines from Leonard Cohen:
We are so small between the stars
A Frenchman writes about the situation in his country and the prospects for change: La Republique’s Last, Best Hope.
There are parallels with the United States.
I did a direct message interview with Forbes Magazine journalist David Axe the first week of November 2023 about the state of the “Wizard War,” that is electronic warfare, between Ukraine and Russia. I’ve cleaned it up for mis-spellings, removed extraneous comments, adding links and photos for clarity and I am presenting it below:
1. The Russians were famous for their battlefield EW prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. How do you think this EW complex stacked up against other countries’ own EW systems?
Russian EW kit has ranged from good to adequate to poor in terms of individual performance compared to Western standards.
The biggest gap seems to be in the latest VKS (Russian Air Force) Khibiny M Electronic Warfare Self Protection Pod (EWSP), which seems to lack the latest digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) technology. [In 2017 the Russians claimed a Su-24M FENCER carrying the new Khibiny M EWSP system had disabled the SPY-1 Aegis weapon system on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. See the picture below] DFRM is needed to survive very long range air to air missile combat engagements and for delivering anti-radar Kh-31/AS-17 KRYPTON missiles, like the US HARM, against ground radars.
There have been X (formerly Twitter) social media videos of VKS jets with pairs of Kh-31 and no EWSP pods. Which meant the jets were using the Kh-31 missile seekers to hunt Ukrainian radars. Shooting both Kh-31 missiles left the jet defenseless!
Where the Russians were outstanding in Feb. 2022 was in terms of the shear numbers of jammers they had with both the force structure and doctrine to operate them. Russia is still a big believer in “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
I’ve felt over the last couple of years, that there is a steep precipice in our path, up to which our current Ruling Class is staggering blindly. Not just our American path, but in the developed world generally, and in that of western Europe. Things just can’t continue as they are. There is a breaking point coming. Really, no one might accurately predict exactly what small spark will kick off the explosion or the fall from a great height, or exactly where it might occur. The precipitating powers move in the shadows, veiled by a news media which deliberately veils them anyway. Too many national and international elites are pursuing policies which benefit them, rather than the countries they are supposed to govern. Too many of the transnational ruling class, indeed, seem to be in competition to pour contempt and derision on their less-fortunate, relatively powerless fellow citizens … and that’s a situation which can’t continue indefinitely. People are too stressed, made angry by things which they can’t control. Road rage incidents, riots that flame up like a prairie fire, unprovoked beatings, mass brawls in fast food restaurants and on commercial airliners; people are snapping over the slightest provocation, a misheard word, a momentary inconvenience…
Surveys show a disturbing degree of support for Hamasand even justification of the October 7 atrocitiesamong younger Americans…and also, following the posting of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ recently on TikTok, a significant number of peopleagain, especially younger ones reading it for the first timereacted favorably to his message. Anti-Israel views among the young are significant enough that even the rather lame support of Israel offered by the Biden administration has resulted in negative poll numbers.
What is going on here?…What is driving the sympathy toward enemies of Israel and America, even ones who have clearly and provably committed horrible atrocities?
Wesley Yang, at X, said:
When we made the succession from a text based culture to a streaming one, all prior knowledge instantly evanesced, reformatting all prior culture and leaving a blank slate In the resulting brave new world children can know they are the opposite sex, mass murderers of civilians are heroes of resistance — and Osama Bin Laden is a profound and wrongly maligned truth teller.
Anything can happen now.
The late Dr. David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian (traditional name ‘Bad Eagle’) and college professor, described an interaction that took place in one of his classes. (excerpted)
“LOOK, DR. YEAGLEY, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.”
The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her “Rachel.”
I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.
“Look at your culture,” she said to me. “Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing.”
Her words disturbed and offended me in a way that I could not quite enunciate.
and
When Rachel denounced her people, she did it with the serene self-confidence of a High Priestess reciting a liturgy. She said it without fear of criticism or censure. And she received none. The other students listened in silence, their eyes moving timidly back and forth between me and Rachel, as if unsure which of us constituted a higher authority.
Yeagley saw a resemblance between Rachel and those Frenchwomen who were quick to associate with the conquering Germans…and he wondered:
Who had conquered Rachel’s people? What had led her to disrespect them? Why did she behave like a woman of a defeated tribe?
The interaction that Dr Yeagley described took place more than 20 years ago. The individuals marinated in the intellectual climate in which the student was steeped have, in many cases, grown up to be professors or teachers inculcating a later and probably even worse version of the attitudes that she voiced.
Yeagley also cited a Cheyenne saying: “A people is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” I don’t have any quantitative data on gender mix, but it’s been observed that a high % of anti-Israel extremistslike those tearing down the ‘kidnapped’ posters and the three just charged with arson at an Israeli defense factory in the USare female. Would a wise Cheyenne advise us to be very worried?
(The Yeagely passage was cited and discussed in my 2020 post Bad Eagle’s Question)
The constant lectures about how bad our society is, how Americans are dangerous people who are on a hair trigger to attack Muslims or gay people or minorities…all of these things have surely had an effect on America’s civilizational self-confidence, especially among those who are too young to remember anything else. As Chris Ferguson said at X:
The modern approach to US history is the equivalent of telling people to think of the worst thing they’ve ever done. Then think about it over and over, everyday, without any positivity or relief. Then, later, wonder why everyone is neurotic.
A commenter on that thread noted that “in all the recent hoopla over identities, kids’ development of an American identity has been completely ignored.” (emphasis added)