Don’t Fear the Beeper

by

I have to admit that I am snickering still over the Mossad’s targeted beeper offensive against Hezbollah … who ought now to go by the nic of “Hezball-less” – snickering in those intervals between genuflecting in respectful admiration to a national intelligence organization who can actually undertake an operation of such … intelligence. And sneaky, original creativity. And command of technological aspects. And a complicated operation conducted by a sub-rosa organization over a long period of time, without a single desk jockey blabbing to a fool like Seymour Hersh. And pulling the detonating cord at a time calculated to inflict the most damage on an enemy chain of command.

From the liver to the knee, indeed.

Read more

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (4): Patterns of Conflict

by

I am not sure if you have been following the saga of the North Carolina GOP nominee for governor, Mark Robinson. Last week CNN’s K-File, “the leading investigation team for the social, mobile generation,” reported that “more than a decade ago” Robinson had posted various comments to an … um… adult web site under a pseudonym.

CNN provided several pull quotes of Robinson’s supposed comments that expressed fondness for certain genres of the adult industry, another stating that “I’m a black NAZI!” and another that “slavery was not bad.”

CNN has been going to town for the past week on this, reporting on what Robinson wrote, then reporting on reactions to what he wrote, then reporting on his campaign crumbling based on what they reported, and then reporting on reactions to the campaign crumbling… you know the drill. This story showed up on every corporate media outlet with every story stating, often several times, that Robinson was “Trump endorsed.”

Did I mention that the Robinson story got more and longer play than the second attempt on Trump’s life?

Let’s face it, while Robinson denies the story and we can poke holes about a few sensational quotes and the larger context, Robinson is politically finished. He was already behind in the polls before the story broke and people, or enough of them, exercise an abundance of caution when it comes to casting votes for people they suspect might be p**n-watching Black Nazis. That’s just the way life is.

Early in my career I was taught an early version of “dance like no one is watching, but text and e-mail like it will end up in court” — or as my mentor said “act like what you are doing is going to end up above the fold of a newspaper.” I also recognized, thirty years ago, that the Internet is forever.

I’m not going to excuse what Robinson wrote, and if as a Christian he is being a hypocrite in some ways, well, so are many of the people I see on Sunday. We are all dependent on God’s grace. Robinson is finished. His staff is quitting, no doubt fund-raising is collapsing faster than his polls.

However, let’s leave Robinson the man aside for a moment and focus on the larger structure of the story.

A man running for governor, in a race and state that has little to no national significance, made some inane and perverted comments on an adult web site, more than a decade ago and long before he entered public life. CNN did not provide any evidence that Robinson has engaged in any such behavior since then, let alone while being in public office.

This same man who is running for governor has been dropping in the polls for the past three months — from a tie in June to 14 points down at the beginning of September — long before this story broke.

So in the middle of one of the most contentious elections in our nation’s history, already studded with extraordinary events such as multiple attempted assassinations of one candidate and the last-minute withdrawal of an incumbent president, CNN decides to focus its “crack” K-File team on this obscure state-level race.

CNN made an extraordinary investment of resources into investigating Robinson. The piece on Robinson runs more than 1,800 words, nearly 2x the average word count for the other K-File stories which deal almost exclusively with people and issues on the national tickets. The Robinson exposé broke with the general “he-said, she-said” pattern of those other stories and actually involved some real digging through primary material. CNN traced Robinson’s supposed pseudonym through other sites and forums, through Twitter. A real, honest-to-goodness investigative report.

Then there was the aforementioned broad coverage that CNN gave to its reporting on Robinson, giving it multiple spots every day on its network and top-page coverage on its web site. The story got national play across multiple outlets for several days. This incredible focus on an obscure race in North Carolina came during not only the final weeks of the most tense national elections in our history, but a few days after the second assassination attempt against the Republican nominee.

Note, again, for all of the work that went into the story, CNN provided no evidence that Robinson has visited any such adult sites or made any related remarks in more than a decade.

So why did CNN do it? Why run this hit piece? A proverbial mountain out of a mole hill? In the doldrums of an off-year election, this might have been a one-day story with maybe a follow-up or two but not the multiple day media frenzy it became. A story of local or regional importance but not this national feeding frenzy. Why?

Was it another entry from the old playbook of “exposing the high holy Republican hypocrite?” No, Robinson is too small-game given the circumstances.

Maybe to hurt Trump in the swing state of North Carolina by depressing Republican turn-out? Perhaps, but if so, a little overboard. The story did break right before ballots were printed, so Robinson is going to be an albatross on the NC GOP from now until Nov. 5. But that’s too local and regional.

Provide a little stray voltage to switch the topic from the second Trump assassination attempt? No, this story was in the works for weeks, and plus, the lefty media has already latched onto the P. Diddy story to provide that electrical juice.

Provide a pretext to keep mentioning the words “Trump,” “slavery,” “Nazi” and “p**n” together in the same sentence for several days? Yeah, now I think we’re onto something. The other night I heard the opening from Monday’s Rachel Maddow show where she repeated Robinson’s comments, linked him to Trump, and came to the conclusion that this was what Robinson (and Trump) had in store for all of us if elected.

This is nit-picking on steroids, but it’s information warfare par excellence. After all, the media isn’t looking back in time to report on how more-important figures than Mark Robinson also have shady pasts: Tim Walz and China, Bernie Sanders and his cozying up to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

CNN’s hit piece is accomplishing three goals for the Left. First, it is appealing to swing voters by pointing to what they can sell as a real-life Republican fascist (Robinson). Second, it’s strengthening cohesion among the Democratic base by using Robinson as a symbol of the stakes involved. Three, and I think most important, it’s sowing confusion and doubt among parts of the Republican coalition, both by exploiting exising fissures and by spreading demoralization at a critical time.

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

John Boyd had a lot to say about the psychological aspects of conflict, from “Organic Design for Command and Control”:

Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops to enmesh adversary in a world of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic chaos … and/or fold adversary back inside himself so that he cannot cope with events/efforts as they unfold.

Cohesion vs. Disruption

That’s what the Robinson story is about.

If he was around today, Boyd would have a lot to say about what’s about to go down over the next several months.

For the Want of a Ship…

by

Priorities. Three data points.

First, remember this story from last month? Navy to Sideline 17 Vessels Due to Manpower Shortages.

So this an example of why the Navy is standing on the edge of a death spiral. We don’t have enough manpower to crew the ships we have, which means we need to take ships out of service, which means we put more pressure on the existing fleet with extended deployments, which means more problems with retention and recruitment. Rinse and repeat. When you see stories like the USS Eisenhower going on a nine month deployment through July of this year, this is the sort of thing that burns out crews and the fleet in general.

Second, I saw this story today, ”US Navy Replenishment Ship Sustains Damage While Operating in Middle East.” That replenishment ship was the only oiler in the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group which is currently operating near Oman in order to deter Iran. That oiler is now out of action and is being towed back to Dubai. There are no other oilers available in the fleet and the Navy is scrambling to find commercial vessels to service the Lincoln strike group.

A military force is only as good as its logistics and no oilers means the Lincoln strike group becomes a coastal force, tethered to ports for replenishment.

Of those 17 ships the Navy wants to take out of service? Two replenishment vessels and one oiler.

Third, Jill Biden reveals $500 Million Plan That Focuses on Women’s Health at Clinton Global Initiative Oh, really? Tell me more, like what problems are going to be addressed and where’s that money coming from?

First lady Jill Biden is unveiling a new set of actions to address health inequities faced by women in the United States, plans that include spending at least $500 million annually on women’s health research.

Biden was making the announcement Monday while closing out the first day of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York.

The additional government spending will mainly come from the Department of Defense…

So when we don’t have enough men and ships for the fleet, the Department of Defense is going to spend nearly $500 million annually on women’s health research? Not HHS or NIH?

Also, why announce this at the Clinton Global Initiative, that well-known personal slush fund for the Clinton crime family?

Did I mention the Clintons gave Joe an award?

Bet you that $500 million could have staffed those 17 ships they are taking off-line, maybe even built a new oiler.

Priorities.

Herd of Cats

by

Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala reminded me of the role that “Never Trumpers” play in our political system. They form a “normative boundary” on the right side of the political system which enables the Left to tar anybody outside of that boundary as “extremist” or “far-right.” Think of Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and the rest as the Great Wall of the Establishment Right, beyond which rage the marauding hordes of Trumpist populism and MAGA who will never get invited inside for fellowships or Bethesda wine tastings.

That role of “right-wing” normative boundary setter is filled on the media side by sites such as The Dispatch and National Review which market themselves to the political ecosystem as the “respectable” Right. So it was with interest that I saw Kevin Williamson’s piece The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio at The Dispatch. Given the title, that it’s Williamson who is a founding member of the Never-Trumper brigade, and that it’s being published by The Dispatch you can reasonably guess where this is going.

Williamson is part of the larger National Review ecosystem that has lashed itself to the mast of “Never Trump,” and like Penelope of ancient myth is faithfully waiting for the spirit of Reagan and Buckley to return. There’s nothing wrong with that, I was a big fan of both in the day, but there’s nothing heroic or even virtuous about keeping a candle lit for ideological purity and trying to LARP Buckley’s purge of the John Birchers when the other side wants you dead.

Then again, better dead than rude.

Williamson sees his role in the political ecosystem as the heroic free-thinking man from the heartland of America, in this case Texas. There’s a lot to commend his earlier writings and he’s paid a professional price for his stances: he was ousted from The Atlantic for his public views on abortion. Now he is on what can only be described as a jihad, a maniacal obsession to rescue the soul of America from what he sees as the grifting sewer that is Trump and MAGA. In that, he’s found a home at The Dispatch.

If Teddy Roosevelt lionized the man in the arena, Williamson thinks he belongs there with him, charging up his literary San Juan Hill with a 6.7-liter diesel truck as his steed and armed with deadly metaphors and bon mots.

His Springfield piece reads as an American version of Heart of Darkness where instead of taking a boat up the Congo river our hero ventures up the country highway through Appalachia and onward toward Springfield in his “big 6.7L diesel.”

As he drives toward Springfield, he observes the contrasting scenes of the landscape. The wonderful natural beauty interspersed with “the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox.” You get the feeling that this would be a better place if not for the people in it. This is his sympathetic side and he’s just warming up, because when arrives in Springfield he finds the Haitian newcomers are just another demonized group of hard-working immigrants pursuing the American dream, a modern-day equivalent of the Irish and those groups that came before them.

The locals complaining about them? Bunch of “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes. See? He’s the truth-teller who got it all figured out within a day or two of arrival. Everybody is playing the part assigned. Rather than using induction and seeing where the evidence takes him, he applies ideology as a reductionist lens to explain Springfield to the larger world. Well maybe “large” isn’t the right word, it is the readership of The Dispatch after all.

Then he writes:

“You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.”


So that’s really the whole purpose of his trip to Springfield. The locals, the Haitians, the American Dream… they were just bit players to support his predetermined narrative of bashing J.D. Vance. You wonder why he burned all that diesel to drive there when he could just have researched his hit piece with a Zoom call. You don’t need to do any research or investigation, just talk to the right people to get the quotes you’re looking for to write the piece you wanted in the first place. That’s Journalism 101.

Nothing about the effects on the local community of suddenly increasing the population by a third through dropping thousands of people from a 3rd World country that came here on a dodgy Biden TPS program. Nothing about how daily life has changed for the people who lived there or their complaints to the elected officials who betrayed them. Nothing about the effects of mass 3rd World immigration on America as seen through the eyes of one American town. America doesn’t belong to the people who live here as much as it does to Williamson’s vision of it.

That’s how you get more Trump.

For Williamson, Vance isn’t just wrong about Haitians and cats or the virtues of Springfield. He’s wrong because for him, Vance betrayed his upbringing — because for Williamson, Vance came from a place where “…. the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and
poisonously backward — you know: Haiti, but with white people.”

There it is and Williamson has quite willingly lent his years of credibility as a conservative writer and his down-home, truth-telling persona to same project Dick Cheney has; that is to define the right-wing side of the civilizational boundary and cast MAGA, Vance, Trump, and all of those “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes in Springfield outside of it. There’s no place in Cheney’s and Williamson’s America for any of them, except to be the target of The Two Minute Hate.

Science, Expertise, Trust…and Peanuts

by

Yann LeCun, who is  Chief AI Scientist at Meta and an ACM Turing Award Laureate, is obviously a very smart and accomplished guy.  At X, he has been arguing for the trustworthiness of science and scientists and asserting that it makes sense for scientists to lean Left…because “they care about facts.”  (here, for example)  I don’t think many of us would disagree with the value of the scientific method and the importance of objective information; I do feel, however, that Yann’s remarks fail to address the importance of funder pressure, peer pressure, and Groupthink on scientific priorities, scientific conclusions, and especially on what gets asserted as The Science by media and politicians.

There has also been some discussion of this cartoon and various experiences that various people have had with doctors who wouldn’t listen.

Very relevantly, there is an article in today’s WSJ about peanut allergy.  The writer, Dr Marty Makary, says that concern about these allergies that began to rise in the 1990s…but that in fact, peanut allergies at that time were rare and mostly mild.  But starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge:

What had changed wasn’t peanuts but the advice doctors gave to parents about them. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond to public concern by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids from peanut allergies. There was just one problem: Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take. Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children 0 to 3 years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts.

The AAP committee was following in the footsteps of the U.K.’s health department, which two years earlier had recommended total peanut abstinence. That recommendation was technically only for children at high risk of developing an allergy, but the AAP authors acknowledged that “the ability to determine which infants are high-risk is imperfect.” Using the strictest interpretation, a child could qualify as high-risk if any family member had any allergy or asthma.

Dr Makary notes that the peanut allergy epidemic is largely a US and UK phenomenon…his African students report no such allergies in Africa, and Makary says that there is also no peanut problem in his own origin country of Egypt.  And, interestingly, Jewish children in Israel have one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared with Jewish children in the UK, suggesting that genetic predisposition is not responsible for the country-to-country difference.

Many Israeli children are fed a peanut-based food called Bamba, and Dr Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, suggested that early consumption of peanuts leads to a low prevalence of the allergy at older ages. He coauthored a paper making this point in 2008, but (this) publication was not enough to uproot groupthink. Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate whether the policy was helping or hurting children.

From 2005 to 2014, the number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in the U.S. By 2019, a report estimated that 1 in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools continued to ban peanuts, and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared.

and

In a second clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, Lack compared one group of infants who were exposed to peanut butter at 4-11 months of age to another group that had no peanut exposure. He found that early exposure resulted in an 86% reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared with children who followed the AAP recommendation. 

From 2005 to 2014, the number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in the U.S. By 2019, a report estimated that 1 in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools continued to ban peanuts, and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared.

Makary is basically asserting that peanut allergy is largely an iatrogenic disease.  One would think that if this was the case, the original recommendations on draconian peanut-avoidance might need to be modified.  But after talking with an allergist friend, Dr Makary said:

The AAP’s absolutism in 2000 had made the recommendation hard to walk back.

I am sure that there are many, many other examples like this, some of them with a lot worse consequences than the Peanut Panic.  It is actually dangerous to treat any individual or institution as beyond challenge.  In aviation, the reluctance to challenge authority (as in the case of a Captain and a First Officer) was identified as a significant safety problem quite a few years ago, and is explicitly addressed in the training of flight crews.  The same principle should apply more broadly.

The Platonic Form of what Science should be, is subject, when translated into operational form, to all the factors that affect other human activities and institutions: incentives, groupthink, political pressure, ambition, cliquishness, etc.

See also my related post Starvation and Centralization.