Sunday, December 23, 2018
Trump Changes Strategy in Syria
Acrimony and unease grip America’s global stability community as President Trump signaled his intent to extract the last remaining US advisors from eastern Syria. With his power as Commander in Chief, the President informed the entire diplomatic, military and intelligence arms of the US government that the end game point in the battle against ISIS for the United States has been reached. The outcry was immediate and vociferous including the resignations of Defense Secretary James Mattis and US Envoy in the fight against ISIS Brett McGurk in protest, their advice to maintain a long-term US presence in the region having been rejected. The US mainstream media, in an odd twist, went into a rare moment of introspective journalism asking if this meant the beginning of the end of Americas “endless wars”.
Elsewhere in the world, recrimination by French President Emmanuel Macron over the Trump’s decision included accusing the US of being an unreliable ally; for the record, Syria is a former French colony. The concern was echoed in the rest of the European Union with nations there asking if the EU needs to purse a global force projection agenda independent of United States leadership. Forces of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan began massing across from Kurdish held territory in Northern Syria clearly anticipating with relish the prospect that US is about to throw them under the bus.
But is Trump’s move reckless? Or does the president see trends in the world that he sees vital to the fate of a nation to step up to? Let’s look at the hand of cards he has.
The endgame of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is near. The philosophical threat of ISIS, the desire for an independent Islamic Caliphate, has receded into a nightmare for its supporters being ruthlessly hunted by everyone, ally and adversary. What is emerging now is a matrix of regional power players over which the US has a very weak hand in influencing directly. Syria is a playing field where the Russians, Turks and Iranians are going to sort it out at the expense of the indigenous natives including the Syrians and the Kurds; yeah same song, different stage. Who gets to be the next Armenians? Just saying.
Leverage in the Middle East going forward can only come from two things. One, is convincing the Russians that they don’t have to be there; that there are more important things to deal with like getting their tiny $1.3 Trillion GDP up and that 80 of 85 districts insolvent problem of theirs under control before they crater internally. Second is diffusing the potential larger war in the Middle East between nuclear armed factions possessing intermediate range delivery weapon systems. Meddling in Syria going forward by the US would make headway in these two areas of US national interest impossible.
The price? The natives. The Syrians. The Kurds. The Iraqis. The Afghans. The legacy of the 400,000 people who died because the United States naively believed we had the power to deliver them from evil. We got lucky in Grenada. Lucky in Bosnia. Lucky in Kuwait. We bit off more than we realized in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I can understand why James Mattis, who lost brave men and women under his command, and Brett McGurk, who forged deep friendship and trust with the natives in the fight against ISIS, would be deeply hurt by this turn of events. They fear for the next 400,000 people who will die in the coming decade if this new game doesn’t work.
And they are right to be fearful. The Fertile Crescent, the former Garden of Eden, has been a layer of Dante’s Inferno for a very long time. Personally, I’m not sure their leaving in protest at this time will help delay the onset of the deaths of the next half million. I’d have stayed to try to save the humans I could while this new strategy found its footing.
I will note that Donald Trump is not the first US President to attempt to end an “endless war” scenario. In the 20th Century, President Richard Nixon did the same over another former French colony painfully trading America’s national prestige for eventual regional stability.
Then the Bush-Clinton-Bush era made us bold because we took on the mantle of being the world’s policeman; the defender of universal human rights. The planet gladly let us while selfishly turning the surface of the earth into collection of locales where human rights are far from universal. We spent treasure and blood in a quest that was always going to reach a limit point; just like every crusade before it.
In the 21st Century, Donald Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama repositioned the United States to be a supporting character in world affairs as opposed to the prime mover of outcome agendas. With such a weak hand, the US must now find a path to world peace.
So help us God.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
A Look Underneath the Hood at Why the New York Times is Attacking Facebook
On Wednesday November 14, 2018, the New York Times declared war on Facebook. Under the guise of an article titled “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis”, the Times lambasted the social media giant accusing the company of internal turmoil at the highest management levels and dubious lobbying activity beginning in 2017 and into 2018.
The Times expose paints Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as an evil figure on the order of the evil queen Maleficent who personifies dark cloud of social media willing to use every insider tool at her disposal to ensure power and influence of her company. The article also paints Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a disingenuous two-face who pretends to care on the outside but has the persona of a heartless automaton on the inside.
NYT printed, “But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from the public.”
That’s a pretty strong and caustic accusation. Interestingly, also an accusation that’s been leveled at social media’s primary rival for political influence, the mainstream media that the New York Times is very much a part of. The specter of selective and biased journalism, so-called “yellow journalism”, isn’t new. The phrase “all the news that’s fit to print” goes back to newspaper tycoons like William Randolph Hearst. The Times has certainly done it’s share of participating in the “resistance” to the administration of US President Donald Trump and is a hardly considered a bastion of fair and balanced reporting anymore as it struggles to maintain market share in its very crowded corner of the media industry where liberal slant publications are packed like sardines into a dwindling total readership base.
And honestly, the New York Times spoke with a forked tongue itself last week. The expose attacked Ms. Sandberg for using her Democratic Party connections particularly with Senator Charles Schumer as a vehicle to stem threats to her firm inferring the possibility of either expensive influence buying or possibly even political collusion. The echo chambers on the internet picked up the lead right on cue turning the senior senator from New York into a lightning rod for criticism. And if you think that’s accidental, I have a bridge for sale.
The forked tongue by the Times came in the form of an opinion editorial published on November 16, 2018 by columnist Michelle Goldberg titled “Democrats Should Un-Friend Facebook” where Ms. Goldberg turns the tables and accuses Facebook of being responsible for helping Republicans win politically by giving them access to the platform; an opinion many Conservatives see rather oppositely. If you think this isn’t a classic political “trial balloon” article too, I’ve got another bridge to sell you.
Personally, I’m very suspicious of the New York Times’ motivations. The bottom line is that NYT thinks social media’s biggest platform is bad for their business. And well they should, like most print businesses, the “Gray Lady” has seen circulation decline since the arrival of the Internet and is down to around 500,000 printed copies per day, half of what it was in 2008. The New York Times, a for-profit business, has turned online circulation currently estimated at around 2.9 million users including paid and unpaid readers of its articles. When you go on the net, you run into Facebook. Facebook has 2.27 billion users worldwide with 240 million of them being in the United States. On its best day, NYT is one percent of Facebook USA and 1/10th of a percent of Facebook Global.
In a lake full of big data, the New York Times is a guppy. And on a social media engine like Facebook where content either has to be placed by purchasing positioning using FB’s advertising engine, which cuts into profitability, or virally cited by one of those 2.27 billion eyeballs, or a “bot” masquerading as an eyeball, they’ll remain a guppy.
Is the “Gray Lady” a sacrifice on the altar of Silicon Valley?
Never ever make the mistake of thinking any “flame war” that erupts on the internet does not have a reason. And in this case, the reasons are not hard to find. What the New York Times describes as a “distraction of personal projects” for Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg are their very focused efforts to execute a strategy of eyeball / mindshare ownership of the internet through a series of strategic acquisitions and cross platform integrations to span generational silos such as Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and the ascendance of their Messenger system to become one of the primary means of one-to-one communication on the Internet. Team Zuckerberg has been displacing competitors such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s Skype using a combination of public forum and private messaging tool offerings. In some countries, it’s become the primary means of communications supplanting even text messaging because FB Messenger doesn’t cost phone users per message charges or have phone records of traffic that prying governments can monitor in real-time.
All this is a preparatory staging to Facebook’s next monetization step on the internet, establishing advertising, marketing and transaction fulfillment space on the internet. By owning the audience’s means of communication, Facebook seeks to undermine and disinter-mediate some of the position of established online shopping giants such as Amazon, Ali Baba and eBay. Notice please, the global nature of the business case scope and the titanic sizes of the behemoths jockeying for position.
Notice further that the other Kings of Silicon Valley are acquiring media companies. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post and is placing a “yuge” headquarters presence in the City of New York. Other acquisitions include Saleforce’s Marc Benioff bought Time and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, bought The Atlantic.
Mr. Bezos’ corporate presence will make him one of the bigger tenants in a town that has an inconvenient truth vacancy space problem. You really think part of the calculus of someone like Bezos isn’t to counter the eyeball ownership advantage of Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, et al? Wake up and smell the coffee.
In an interview for Recode.net November 5, 2018, NY Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger was quoted as saying “the New York Times is not for sale”. That may not be a position he can maintain forever.
“Do no evil.”
In social media, even the best edited long form article by a publication like the Times has to compete on a level playing field basis against the virality of a Tweet by @realdonaldtrump or an article on AmericaOutLoud by some schmuck named Santiago. I cannot imagine that this “new normal” does not drive NYT’s management bonkers. The internet took control over deciding what “news is fit to print” away from them.
But let’s unfold this evolution of new media vs. old media one additional unveiling of the curtain further and ask, is Facebook evil? It’s certainly huge. It’s certainly rich. It’s certainly coming out of a phase of innocence where the presumption that content would sort itself out because people are smart and able to tell real from fake and objective from manipulative has given way to realizing that an open platform will be taken advantage of by interests motivated by all manner of subterfuge in the name of some end justifying the means. Is it evil to have been naïve? Is it diabolical to have designed a content micro-casting engine so well, it allows 2.27 billion people on this planet to have their own personalized virtual world bubble? Was there intentional malice on the part of Facebook or the other social media engines to disrupt the social fabric of the United States and turn it into an animus filled Balkan morass? Honestly, I don’t think so.
I have seen nothing so far that indicates that Facebook has done anything but deliver a perfect bubble for every eyeball. I see perfectly well that this is how an engine that caters to human interests and intentions should be technically designed to work. Such systems create new ecosystems, clusters and networks of affinities, what humans call groups of friends. I can see that the creators of these system would want to eventually monetize their efforts into markets as a classic extension of age of electricity Marshall McLuhan Madison Avenue marketing and advertising theories. And I can see that these disruptive innovations on the internet would eventually cause a massive shift in how information and economics flows through society.
What I do not think Mark Zuckerberg ever dreamed would happen in this college dormitory was that evil humans would exploit his platform and use it as a mechanism to recruit armies to fight culture wars. But that’s the problem that now besets the company he founded. And I’m not really sure that responding to a curve ball like this would not make anyone stumble a few steps coming to terms with it.
But I’ll assert this next. What people with dark hearts fear isn’t so much that Facebook can be used to exploit the frailties other humans. No. What they fear is that Facebook is still an equal playing field where any group can try to get away with something. What they fear most is that their enemies will succeed before they do. I think this is why you see efforts to impede companies like Facebook from implementing future technologies on their platforms that can keep playing fields fair appearing in the sphere of public policy debate. The last thing that dark forces want is to allow social media to continue to improve so that their subterfuge becomes instantaneously transparent.
And those dark forces come in many shapes. I would highly recommend to Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg to grab the complete video log of the “After the Digital Tornado” conference held in December 2017 hosted by Kevin Werbach at the Wharton School. I attended this symposium held just four months after the date of the meeting noted in the New York Times article. It was where the leading academics first labeled the big internet companies including Facebook as dangerous entities that needed to be brought to ground by constraints and regulations. I was an uncomfortable practitioner at this gathering of academics and did not agree with their conclusions. However, their research and theories continue to manifest and work their way into public policy.
Then again, the internet moves far faster than academia or government realize. I can tell you right now that somebody at Facebook is going to read this article and from here they will eventually find one I wrote sitting on Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global “Three Steps to Take Control Back from the Media Anyone Can Do”, https://medium.com/thrive-global/three-steps-to-take-control-back-from-the-media-anyone-can-do-924e8a4b518e. And from there I bet it’s just a matter of time before social media platforms will all learn to un-spin yellow journalism for users in real-time, identify the actual agents behind agendas, laudable and nefarious, also in real-time, and educate people in how to actually get to the real source material behind the noise and digest it in real-time. Then we can return to the presumption that content will “sort itself out” because social media will assist people to be smarter and able to tell real from fake, objective from manipulative.
Whether there’s still a place for outlets like the New York Times in the form it exists in now when that time comes, who knows. And to be frank when that time comes, who will still care?
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Suspicious Border Incursions
Photo: Jorje Cabrera, Reuters |
There are “caravans” marching north though Mexico originating from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Presently around 1,500 miles away, they get out of their trucks to march for the benefit of cameras with uncannily precise timing to arrive on the precipice of the U.S. November midterm election.
Is your spider sense tingling? Are you wondering if this is
a scam? So am I.
These people are portrayed as refugees; but are they? They
aren’t acting like it. There’s a pretty straightforward script about how
refugees are handled on this planet. The international law on asylum is that
the asylum seeker is supposed to present themselves to the authorities of the first
international border they reach upon fleeing their countries. For Central
Americans fleeing north from their governments, that country is Mexico;
specifically, the southern border of Mexico.
The way it is supposed to work, Mexico, with aid from the
international community, is supposed to set up refugee camps. The coordination
body for this is U.N. High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). It is from these
camps, that other organizations such as the US Office for Refugee Resettlement
are supposed to process persons to qualify eligible refugees for movement from
the camps to a third host nation. If this were the Middle East, the analogy
would be people in Iraq and Syria fleeing ISIS going into U.N. camps in
Jordan.
Here’s where it gets weird. That’s exactly what the UNHCR,
Mexico and United States are trying to do in this case. This is not a money
issue. The US, Mexico and the UN have the money and resources to support a
proper refugee camp. We’re talking 1,500 people per caravan which is a drop in
the bucket compared to the 11 million Syrians, Kurds and Yazidis displaced in
the Middle East.
But wonder of wonders, these people are refusing to go into
camps and process as refugees. Somebody’s giving them a better deal than the
internationally sanctioned solution set. Instead, they are marching towards the
US border escorted by, and it seems funded by, American activist handlers. What
does that tell you is really going on here? Again, are these people really legitimate
refugees from their own governments? If so, what exactly are they fleeing?
Let’s dig a little more.
First, these marchers do come from three relatively small
economies. Guatemala has a $75.6 billion GDP nation, El Salvador a $24.8
billion GDP and Honduras has a $22.98 billion GDP. But here’s the thing. As of
2017, the GDP’s of all three of these countries was growing. Yeah, you heard
that right, growing. Note that all three of these governments are imploring
their citizens to return. And they were doing that before Donald Trump
threatened to cut off aid to them. What’s the underlying stress that may be
besetting Central America? Here are my observations.
First, this may very well have simpler explanations that
have nothing to do with being refugee problems. People leaving otherwise improving economic conditions speaks more to
internal forces having to do with economic opportunity inefficiencies within
these nations. One of the organizers of the caravan is a Honduran ex-lawmaker named
Bartolo Fuentes who’s apparently been organizing caravans since last September
as reported by the New York Post and Daily Beast. These are normally small groups numbering in
the 200 range. According to the NYPost,
the swelling in numbers for this caravan may have been triggered by a woman referring
to “assistance” in an interview on Hoduran TV news channel HCH. Mr. Fuentes reported a surge in phone calls
following the broadcast.
What does that mean? Could this be local politics in Central America gone viral on the world stage because of the internet? It's certainly not the first bizarre consequence effect we've seen happen. Or, it
may be simple economics in action. It
costs an average of $7,000 USD to pay a coyote to smuggle a person to the
United States. A caravan with “assistance”
reduces that cost per traveler considerably … and potentially upsets the human
trafficking economies extending from Central America to the United States. Think about the implications of that one
buckwheat.
OAS considerations.
More broadly, what Central American nations do share, actually
the entire Western Hemisphere and the Organization of American States, is a
common problem called Venezuela. That socialist state is a basket case of a
national failure. Venezuela’s economy has collapsed thirty-seven percent (-37%)
since 2014 from being a $482.4 billion GDP nation to a maybe $300 billion GDP
country today; that’s a loss of $182 billion of GDP by Venezuela. That math
basically means that Venezuela has evaporated wealth greater than the combined
economies of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The stresses put on Venezuela’s
neighbors because Nicolas Maduro is nincompoop of a socialist despot even by
socialist’s standards is a problem now beginning to resonate throughout the New
World.
My instincts say Maduro is triggering the Western Hemisphere
equivalent of the refugee problem besetting Europe. We are facing a problem
very similar to the walking wave of people seeking economic opportunity while hanging
on to their cultural identity. They,
like their migrant counterparts in the EU, are escaping a no go home scenario. The
similarity to what is challenging Europe is uncanny; except the problem for the
New World isn’t Muslim refugees displaced from their homes in Syria, Kurdistan,
Libya, or Sudan, it’s Venezuelans displaced from their homes.
The Venezuelans need that $182 billion of lost GDP to
survive and like their Muslim counterparts in the Old World, they are pursuing
a scrounge at the expense of their hosts path to that desperate survival. Central
America is being invaded by Maduro’s refugee hordes.
So far, no one has the guts to do something about the cancer
that is Venezuela’s blight upon the Americas. This is not going to get smaller
as Central and South America’s economies continue to crater under the weight of
the spread of that pathetic socialist failure.
The Gringo Factor
Stranger still, groups in the US are seeking to exploit the plight of the innocent for their own political purposes, most embarrassingly, by activists and globalists in the United States. The political elite Gringo’s are being ugly Americans using these people like pawns. I doubt they even actually care what happens to them, or their countries.
Stranger still, groups in the US are seeking to exploit the plight of the innocent for their own political purposes, most embarrassingly, by activists and globalists in the United States. The political elite Gringo’s are being ugly Americans using these people like pawns. I doubt they even actually care what happens to them, or their countries.
Here’s my reality check.
Cooler heads than the American hotheads are beginning to voice their
concerns. Eventually, I think the
suggestion of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau that the countries of North America, who have strong economies, will
have to solve this problem as an Organization of American States problem. It will become front burner policy.
My suggestion to President Trump is to seriously consider
these posits. We may need to build a coalition of the willing to help Central and
South America find a better future without a Maduro led Venezuela. We may need to re-cast how US aid to Central America can be better used to further decrease the attraction of economic migration from these countries. And, we may have to deal with the economic food chain of human trafficking in the New World.
There are global repercussions that accompany this strategic
realization.
Meditate on this more I shall.
Meditate on this more I shall.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Trump Shuffles House of Cards at the UN
photo: AP/Mary Altaffer |
During the first minute of his speech on the 25th of
September 2018 to the United Nations General Assembly, president Donald J. Trump
received a greeting of muted laughter. For the near hour of the speech that
followed, you could have heard a pin drop in the cavern. Trump minced no words.
He was brutally clear to everyone in the General Assembly that the United
States of America meant business. The repercussions of that speech will be world
changing.
Foremost In the president's message to the world was his
rejection of globalism represented most by the governing apparatus of the
United Nations and its supporting agencies. The UN had been born in an era of
global power concentration at the end of World War II. It has functioned as
such since then concentrating the real power over the planet in the Security
Council. This model husbanded the planet through the Cold War and a period of post-Colonialism
in the aftermath of it. But much like his domestic presidency is a recognition
that established bureaucracies can become bloated by elitism and hubris, so can
the world stage.
I found it poetic that this message to the world that the
time has come to set central control aside and embrace a more plural form the
world governance was delivered in the General Assembly where decades of
evolution adding nations represented in the room have brought necessity to
evaluate the issue of how nations relate to each other to the forefront.
This has been evolving for some time. The world has become
more regionalized with confederations, some cooperative and some adversarial,
emerging on the planet. The European Union has gone through several cycles of
growing pains, so has Russia and its Confederation of Independent States. These
two regions of the world have now existed in their present forms for longer
since the fall of the Berlin Wall now longer than the entire length of time the
Cold War wall existed. The Middle East and Africa have undergone radical change
from a landscape of colonies to amalgams of nations. The world became plural in
an image, quite honestly, modeled after the original hopes of the United
Nations and financed, in many cases, by the treasure of the United States.
Mission accomplished. Hooray for us monkeys!
In his speech, Trump challenged this now more plural world
to begin to live up to its potential. In doing so, he announced that it was
time to win the world of American dependence. He pointed out that for America
to navigate into its own future such a change was a necessity. He implied that
this necessity applied to every other nation as well. The stunned silence in
the room was surely no surprise to the American delegation delivering this 21st
century tough love message.
I smiled to myself as I listened to it not because I am an
isolationist, but because I am an American. I’m pragmatic about the practice of
global stability and national policy. I found my thoughts drifting back to a
much younger United States of America. In the 1790’s and leading up to the War
of 1812, the United States was a beacon of freedom to a Western Hemisphere
dominated by colonial masters. They coveted how the United States was thriving
in its social and power experiment. Throughout the Americas, people saw the
emergence of a free and independent nation and wanted the same for themselves.
America's leaders struggled with the requests for aid throw off the world
powers of that era and cast them out of the New World. There was acrimony about
it at the time, and regret. America's leaders knew we were not rich enough or
powerful enough come to the aid of our neighbors and risk the combined might of
Europe against us. Mind you the British did try. Lucky for us, we survived the
War of 1812. More importantly for the world’s future, we chose to lead by
example that would become a hallmark of our future conduct on the world stage.
We took the position of tough love showing our neighbors what was possible, to
inspire hope even if (no because) we were unable to do it for them. We recognized
even then the wisdom of teaching others to fish.
If you think about it openly, the world is in a similar
position today following the abandonment of colonialism worldwide. There are
only two nations rich enough to vie for hegemony on this planet. This would be
the multi-trillion economies of the United States and China. No one else has
this potential. Both nation’s societies are presently in flux. One is pursuing
hyper-patriotic centralization of social values controlled via the technology
of universal social scoring. The other tumultuously hangs on to its internal
pluralism using technology in an endless series of trials by fire, well
technically flame wars, to bring everyone’s egos to ground.
Stepping back and looking objectively, both nations are
experiments in the future of complex societies for this planet. Opposite in
approach, these two nations are the templates for where technological humanity
must find a future. Clearly neither model has found its sweet spot yet. Is what
it is. What will be interesting in the next decade is whether the US and China come
to blows over these templates or find a way to manage their polar forms of
leadership in concert for the benefit of the remainder of the world.
Perhaps we’ll find a new détente. Hopefully, the UN General
Assembly noted in its silence of President Trumps speech, the bilaterally
messages between the Unites States and the nations single out by the US, that
included carrots and sticks, loud and clear.
I believe that the American delegation’s message to the
United Nations in 2018 will go down in history as a reminder by the United
States of the same message it has stood for since its birth.
For whatever acrimony the news of the day makes of this inconvenient
truth, President Trump did his job as our messenger effectively.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Fantasy Trumps Reality; It’s Not Bots, It’s Us
The ability of the Internet to cause storms of social
upheaval has reached epic proportions. Since the November 2016 election the
Internet has been used by political parties to ferment acrimony in the national
debate far beyond anything we ever saw in terms of campaign influence efforts
by any party foreign or domestic. The degree of malicious animus that the
entire world is seeing us undergo is, quite frankly, embarrassing. We have literally
descended to high school clique mean people politics.
The most recent of these being the nomination to the Supreme
Court of Brett Kavanaugh where, at the last minute after a seemingly clear
path to confirmation had been achieved, an accusation exploded into “court of
public opinion” virality. It doesn’t matter to many people whether the
accusation is founded. It doesn’t matter that the State of Maryland, where the
incident allegedly occurred, has already stated that in the 1980’s the law was
that such an infraction by a minor would have been a 2nd degree
misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has long expired; and would
have been expunged from the record upon the age of majority.
No. What matters is that the obsession of all parties, of an
entire nation, is to sacrifice Kavanaugh like a lamb on an altar over an
obsession with another man, President Donald Trump. He’s the real “bad boy” that
women have that love-hate fantasy with as noted in that old 1970’s feminism
text, Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden”. Entire genres of both pornographic scripting
and victim archetype psychotherapy have evolved from that book.
Today, it seems that total Internet bandwidth utilization is
split 50/50 between these two themes. Well, the social media acrimony half also
shares its allocation with all the other mundane functions of the internet. All
of it makes money from combinations of actual purchases, ad serves, or user
data mining marketing intelligence. We are the product. Yeah that’s right,
looking at the raw traffic data tells you a lot about America.
We are also the fuel that keeps this cycle of meanness
going. The thing about the internet is that it’s a totally level playing field
of democracy. Tumultuously fair. Everyone’s voice counts equally, albeit with amplifications
that come from the gossipy effects of combinations of money and sex appeal.
Anyone can Tweet. Anyone can make a snarky Facebook post. Anyone can generate a
meme. These are all tracked, cataloged and sorted into data mining information for
sale right along with your browser cookies of what you are looking at even if
you think you are expunging them by the way. Regardless, the cumulative effect
on the human brain as we “monkey up” trapped in our biological evolution to be
creature of stimulus-response, is that we begin to believe that what appears on
the LED screens is real. It’s not. The internet is just like TV, it’s a “boob
tube”, pure entertainment for the mind. Something primates do while waiting for
the meteor to hit.
To be sure, the big internet companies take this phenomenon
very seriously. Not because they care about people’s mental health mind you. It’s
because they know that every fad has a half-life and sooner or later, Facebook
could become Prodigy and fade into oblivion. Like their television counterparts
who are seeing the public’s interest decline because the noise saturation level
of the medium has reached abandonment behavior levels, the internet giants are
seeing their own credibility questioned more and more. There’s a big debate
over what to do with the monopoly positions that companies like Google,
Facebook and Twitter have achieve in the mindshare of adult America. I note
“adult” with emphasis, the kids have their own places on the internet they use.
The sites adults argue about are called “old people” watering holes. You ought
to know this if you are reading this article that in internet dog years, you
are an old fart.
The Internet debate rages from academia to government. The
academics, mostly left leaning, who in the 1990’s argued vociferously for an
open and unregulated internet free of influence from “the man” have, in the
last couple of years, done a 180 degree about face. The last conference on this
I attended in November 2017 called “After the Digital Tornado” http://digitaltornado.net/schedule/
was interesting in that eventually this same 1990’s academic brain trust used
the same arguments of Heidegger, Kafka and Marx to argue for a conversion of
the market-based Internet into a central government regulated utility internet.
No really. You can use the same body of academic reference base to create any
outcome posit you want. My considered strategic net assessment analyst reaction
to the conference, with decades of heuristic and mathematical modeling under my
belt? Groucho trumps Karl. Always has, always will.
Now government is getting involved. On Friday September 21st
2018, The White House released a document titled the “National Cyber Strategy
of the United States of America”, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/National-Cyber-Strategy.pdf
It’s a 40 page document that parallels many of the recommendations from a book
by Tim Maurer named “Cyber Mercenaries”. It’s a very well written, if deeply
academic language laced, examination of cyber policies and strategies around
the world that fairly describes the issues different countries face in dealing
with cyberspace and the state and non-state actors within it. The US strategy
statement elucidates our perspective and aspirations within this larger global
playing field.
But there are dangers not noted in the latest White House
document. Concepts of governance become moot when the baseline tech shifts back
from central server to distributed infrastructure models. That’s coming. It’s
called the Internet of Things (IOT). The “things” keep getting smarter to the
point that they become mobile self-contained data centers, that’s what a
self-driving vehicle is while it’s parked and plugged into an outlet. It’s
R2D2. The lobbying of the monopoly companies to retain their market share is
intense. But think about it, there’s no reason why social media needs to be a
one stop portal. There’s no reason why Amazon should be the only company store
that matters, that it should replace the post office, UPS and Fedex. One of the
laments of the academics I do agree with is that the Internet used to have
hundreds of them; that the Internet used to better fit the design of a
competitive market space where on single company had greater than fifty percent
market share. That is wasn’t a landscape of pseudo-utilities with unregulated
staffs not subject to internal controls on behavioral norms. Economic interest
wise, big companies and big governments like cozy rooms. That’s ultimately a
bullshit reason for how to design the internet too. Posit in your head for a moment
if social media was a society of 100,000 small servers, each governed by a
sysop, the net would be self-neutral via natural counterbalancing. All these
central control computer programs and intrusive data mining systems would either
be superfluous or governed via a very different set of norms and expectations. My
point here is, we are still in the stage of baby steps even if our egos try to
tell us otherwise.
But the danger to the US in cyberspace is that our own
domestic ineptitude, as seen in how our people are so vulnerable to the
cancerous effects of “low information” viewer social media, are the seeds of
our own destruction in the global race for dominance in cyber norms and
behaviors. We presently do not hold the moral high ground of behavior. It means
we are on a path to lose the cyber war asymmetrically. We will concentrate on infrastructural
security raising barriers to entry to innovation even as the global technology
base develops futures designed on completely different infrastructure models from
the ones our bureaucracies know how to regulate. We will concentrate on
managing down “bots” while at the same time artificial intelligence is making
it that you cannot tell an internet robot from and actual human, and the robots
actually will eventually serve you better as they evolve from toys into
“droids”. What have not even begun to do is teach humans to separate fantasy
from fact, to learn to live beyond being audiences of LED “boob tubes” willing
to believe the shallowest of lies because it gives us a biological endorphin
rush.
We have a long way to go.
Sunday, August 19, 2018
President Trump Needs to Establish a “Brennan Rule”
The feud between former Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (DCIA) John Brennan and President Donald Trump points out an important
clarification that needs to happen with respect to former officials engaging in
active public debate to current administration policies and strategies.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Mr. Brennan disagreeing
with the President. He is an experienced and insightful man with a long history
serving his country. He has his own opinions as an independent pundit that he
is very much entitled to. Where he has gotten himself into trouble is the use
of his security clearance as a professional bona fide to imply he is a person of
authority in current public policy debate. Personally, I doubt Mr. Brennan
himself would imply this; but, he is in the employ of media organizations, the
so-called 4th estate, that can and do imply to the public that his
words carry such weight. They do not. Official weight comes only from the
present officials in power holding the offices, doing their duty.
It is wrong for Mr. Brennan to overly project himself into the
affairs of the keepers of the current watch no matter how much he believes in
his views of the world. He’s not the one in the room looking at the current lay
of the land, with both the clearance and the need to know to make today’s
decisions. He should defer to the
people who hold the active-duty positions in government to affect the national
policy of the United States of America.
For instance, Mr. Brennan as DCIA oversaw a period of
operations in the Middle East where the US engaged in a campaign of using unreliable
operatives that didn’t quite work out as hoped. The campaign was designed by
his predecessor DCIA David Petraeus who, fresh from his experience gaming
warlord vs. warlord in Afghanistan, had the idea of stabilizing the western
portion of the northern Middle East using proxies against unfriendly
governments. And so began a CIA led effort that armed unreliable Sunni factions
of Saudi sympathizers in Syria that would ultimately give birth to ISIS and
create an opening for Iran to attempt to create the so-called “Shia Crescent”. We
couldn’t balance our strategy with Shiites because the Imams of that sect are
from hated US enemy, Iran; so we turned to the Kurds which, because half of
them are in Turkey, eventually strained relations with that ally. It was a
brilliant plan designed to fail. I remember hearing Petraeus discuss this at a
Reagan National Defense Forum at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California
once. My net assessment instincts were tingling with alarm bells. The strategy
violated basic sphere of influence with respect to the one player the CIA brain
trust underestimated, Russia and its commitment to the official government of
Syria, the Alawite tribes of Bashar al-Assad. The net projection did not
compute. And in the end, the what did compute is what happened, the entire
campaign to unseat Assad failed. Mr. Assad is today, mopping up the last of the
opposition forces enabled directly and inadvertently by the CIA of 2012 to
2016.
I recant this to make the point that the current “cooks in
the room” are dealing with a very different set of global stability
circumstances than that of the pre-Trump era. I could have used examples from
the situations in NATO, North Korea, the South China Sea and others. Even our
relationship on what the best going forward strategy to deal with China, an
economic competitive and influence balance problem, and Russia, a boundaries of
influence problem with a heavily nuclear armed, 1/10th GDP size of its
opponents problem. My point here is not that Mr. Brennan does not have opinions
on these matters. My point is that he is NOT
IN THE ROOM. Clearance be damned, he does not have the need-to-know to make
current US policy and strategy decisions. That he has personal reservations about
the team now in the room is immaterial. They are also diligent and experienced
people. And I’ll remind all those who have been told this, the greatest ethic
of all in national matters. “Beyond this
point, there is no left of right, there are only Americans.” My problem
with Mr. Brennan is that he seems to have lost faith in our nation and its
remarkable ability to persevere. I never lost it when he was in power. I do not
know why he fails to do the same now that someone else is.
Then comes the media problem. Mr. Brennan exacerbates the
situation by expressing his views in the mainstream media, a medium currently
struggling for relevance in the political landscape against its
disintermediation by the Internet, a replacement medium that is increasingly
being adopted by world leader ship as a primary pathway for expressing
international policy bypassing traditional media. As the media struggles
believing it self to be part of policymaking when it is in fact merely an
observer of the process, it places former officials like John Brennan into a
difficult situation. Personally, his advice and counsel are better served with
in the traditional private world of consultative discussions between current
and former officials that has been how we carry on the long-term corporate
memory of the Nation. That Mr. Brennan clashes with the administration outside
of these confidential circles is what causes the current problem that President
Trump has been placed in a difficult position to deal with.
I believe that it is important for the
United States to clearly delineate between consultative efforts by former
officials in support of the government from public punditry that may interfere
with the conduct of the work of the current watch. In the past, we relied on
the discretion of these former officials to understand this difference. In the
current environment of former officials becoming part of an opposition message
marketed news media, this ground rule and assumption begins to falter. The nation
must now deal with a cost benefit trade off between the advice that a former
official can give versus the damage that a former official can do. The most
poignant example of this problem stands before us in the personage of John Brennan.
I would respectfully suggest to President Trump that a rule
should be established that a former official who, of his own volition, chooses
to leave the cadre of consulted former officials to become a
member of an opposition
motivated industry should relinquish all connections to the government
as part of becoming a member of that media. It is in our national interest that
both the administration and Mr. Brennan make it clear that anything he says on
the air is formulated from his considered opinion in complete isolation from
what is officially happening inside the security and stability policy processes
of the government of the United States.
I believe it would be good for both the US government and
for Mr. Brennan to formally declare a hard disconnect to make it clear that the
debate and disagreement that may or may not continue going forward is based on
truly independent and carries no color or implication of authority. Now, I do
not believe Mr. Brennan would do this himself. But I believe his employers in
the media are doing so as part of their campaign to market the good old days of
the Obama administration to their resistance-oriented viewers. Ethically, I
don’t think Mr. Brennan should be comfortable being in such an awkward
position.
I personally encourage Mr. Brennan to stand on his own soap
box alone and proud with his thoughts. I welcome hearing them. However, he
should not sanction to imply that his thoughts continue to carry the weight of
officialdom well after the end of
his tenure in government service. I believe that at some point Mr. Brennan may
end his participation in the media. At that time, when he is ready to re-enter
the cadre of old guard consultative voices in confidence again; that is when
reconsideration of regranting him clearance should occur. In the meantime, his
best service to the Nation may be to be the boy blue sounding his horn in the
wilderness of the mainstream media.
To President Trump, I would say that I think this is a fair
test that all who have at one time served the United States in some capacity of
confidence should embrace. We all took an oath. We all made a promise. We all know
that that promise is for life. We all know that when our shift ends, we turn it
over to the next guy. That’s what makes sense for a great America.
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Trump’s Aggressive Shuttle Diplomacy; In Search of the Eurasian Border
President Donald Trump continues to prove himself to be a diplomat who thinks out-of-the-box. The NATO summit in Brussels, despite all it’s testiness and recrimination by his detractors, brings up several realities that the alliance needs to deal with if it is to remain relevant as a contributing body to future world peace.
As a longtime analyst, NATO, in my observation, has been
morphing away from being a purely defensive alliance to becoming a de facto expansionist
one in the European theater. In concert with the economic agenda of the
European Union, NATO has been expanding its presence into eastern Europe coming
ever closer to the traditional influence sphere of Russia in the last 25 years.
As eastern European countries have discovered the attraction of Western
economic advantages, they have sought to join the military alliance as part of
their migration from what was the old Warsaw Pact. This has led to some interesting
political clashes in this expanded Europe that puts
active socialist experiments in Western Europe in league with recovering failed communist experiments in
Eastern Europe. Within this loose
union, this new European landscape has proven to have all of the hill and
valley complexities that have marked such matrices throughout history; and it
is a tenuous matrix as best, as the world has witnessed the players within the
EU/NATO system experimenting, sometimes dangerously, to define the future of
their sphere of influence.
All of this ebullience has not gone unnoticed on the eastern
border of the new NATO where the power shifts into the hands of mother Russia.
In the minuet of set piece
warfare that forms the
long wave undertone
of conflict for Europe ever since the end of the Hundred Years War, these
subtle border shifts expanding eastward have the net effect of an invasion not
unlike the threat of Operation Barbarosa was to the motherland’s Steppes in the
mid-20th Century.
Russia, for its part, has sought to adjust and consolidate
its latter day version of a Maginot line making shifts to territorial
alignments to fix haphazardly drawn borders from the aftermath of the Cold War.
This has caused, and will continue to cause, a growing tension between the
evolving nouveau Europe, a $14 trillion GDP federation, and the prideful but
poor order of magnitude poorer eastern empire of Vladimir Putin. This economic
disparity makes for a very real and volatile border tension reality.
But wait. Let’s take a step back for a second from our
perspective as the outside third party. What is the national interest of the
United States when looking at the evolution of these two very important spheres
of influence that characterize most of the northern half of the Eurasian
continent?
Clearly, we see value in both of these power spheres. We
have a long history of interaction with both western Europe and Russia. We have
cultural and strategic reasons for wanting to have productive relations with both. Simple pragmatism
dictates that EU/NATO and
Russia are both equally vital to our strategy to ensure global stability
and world peace. These two spheres, along with China, are the fundamental building blocks of a
likely future northern alliance that could at
some point replace the peacekeeping function of the United Nations; an organization now suffering
from the ill effects of too much autocratic world mediocrity and
prejudice disguised as international democracy. Therefore, it does fall to the United States
to be the bringer of tough love to the alliance.
And that is precisely what the president of the United
States did at the NATO summit. President Trump recognized the self-interest of EU/NATO
Europe to build a sphere of influence within which its evolving federation can
grow. He then pointed out that if this is the aim of this new EU, it would have
to fund it’s military border with the Russians much more indigenously. In his
policy position, it is apparent to me that Donald Trump did the calculus of
deterrence. It’s not that hard. He spelled out to the Western Europeans the
simple formula that a 4% of GDP commitment to military spending is what it
would take to sustain a fully credible deterrent of the type that would
stabilize the border between the Western and Russian spheres of influence. It’s
a simple global stability equation; one that both the Europeans and the
Russians can, and very well do, understand. Mr. Trump, who if you haven’t been
reading Twitter, understands that plain and direct messaging gets results when
it comes to asserting influence, set the 4% line because it is a plain language
message that even economists would understand. Yes, that was a dig. Here is the
simple math. 4% of the GDP
of Western Europe in aggregate spent on defense is roughly 50%
of Russia’s GDP. It creates the conditions for resilient stability; an overwhelming
deterrent advantage in the mission to stabilize a sphere of influence border.
Mr. Trump further recognizes the dangerous nuance that the
spending pain by NATO has to be equitably distributed among all of the members.
It creates this business concept called “buy in”. It is astute acumen by Mr.
Trump. Every student of military history that has studied Europe knows that a
failure to ensure parity in participation eventually leads to disastrous outbreaks
of European warfare. Don’t repeat the League of Nations mistake; it’s bad. It
was clear to me in Mr. Trump’s messaging that he had thought long and hard
about far more complex elements than people give him credit for. The summit
ended with grudging pledges of new commitment. President Trump called it a
success; probably more of a strategic success that an everyone feels good one. As
they say, sweat equity.
Back to all about “US”. What does that buy the national
interest agenda of the United States? In global stability, everything is an
enabler. Things are a turn within a tun within a turn. The next logical step is, for anyone
paying attention, already
coming into play.
On July
15 in Helsinki, Mr. Trump
will meet with Mr. Putin in what will be a
private bilateral relations discussion between two major military powers and
world affairs influences. The USA will ponder thoughts with the nation most critical to enabling
global stability in the lower 2/3 landmass of planet earth. It’s a
tumultuous co-dependency for sure; but then again, so was perpetuating a Cold
War for decades while waiting to find out if the Reich would rise again? What?
You didn’t think that was a big part of why we both did it?
Economically, it’s another order of magnitude disparity. The
US with it’s over $16 trillion GDP dwarf’s Russia; although, the two leaders do
share parallel concerns about certain portions of their federations being
economically problematic. Housekeeping is a universal pain it the butt. Still, President
Trump will be bringing the vast richness of the United States, who’s GDP as a
single nation equals and exceeds the entirety of Western Europe’s; and is
matched by only one other trading partner, China, to the chat room. Economically,
it will be a giant sitting down to talk to a dwarf, a very prideful dwarf.
Militarily it will be a unique peer like no other on this planet having a heart
to heart discussion about what to do to bring peace to troubled regions in the
world; with the combined imperial power to make those changes happen.
Mr. Trump has set a very interesting stage indeed.
Parting Shot
I understand that the news media is captive to reporting the
blow-by-blow minutia of events as they unfold. But this is not the way to view
these events. This is more like watching the story arc of a grand play
unfold. Ultimately, it is left to us, the citizens,
to discern the movie
from the soundbites.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Childish Border Wars; Wrong Border?
US immigration policy has had a rough time of it lately. On January 30, 2018, President Donald Trump asked Congress to pass comprehensive reforms on immigration trying to end an arduous era of border policy by executive order that began long before his administration. So far, no joy as Mr. Trump faces bi-partisan opposition in the Legislative Branch seemingly more incentivized to kick the can down the road so as to preserve the immigration issue as a talking point for electoral politics. This has forced the Executive Branch to go back to effecting border policy via Executive Order; and oddly, put @realdonaldtrump, as the President is known on Twitter, in the same less than desirable muddling box as his predecessor Barack Obama.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Obama both share episodes of dealing with families arriving on the US border seeking asylum. Mr. Obama’s problems occurred in 2014 when a wave of people fleeing turmoil in Central America reached the US border after traveling through Mexico. The event overwhelmed the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Services as well as the those of the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The result was a rash of family detentions triggering the issue of child separations that Mr. Obama’s administration, also getting little help from Congress, coped with via Executive Order as it sorted out who could stay in the US and who had to return to their countries of origin. In Obama’s case, after trying to separate children and failing, and unable to detain entire families while their cases were pending, the federal government ultimately decided to use a form of electronic hostage taking as part of its enforcement strategy. Obama instructed the federal apparatus to place ankle tracking bracelets on the legs of the mothers, a direct threat to the central figure of these family units.
In 2018, the US formally changed the authorized ceiling of the number of refugees allowed into the country radically cutting the figure. This recognizes a policy change that began with the new administration that shifted US protocol from attempting to fill quotas to the maximum each year to one of practicing a higher-degree of scrutiny in who qualifies for the US refugee program. It is important to note that this pattern of “extreme vetting” has manifested in other ways including Trump’s day one ban on entry by persons from certain at-risk nations know to be sources of radicalized terrorism; a national security policy that was also pursued with less success by Trump’s predecessor Obama. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, presidents are, in the end, caretakers of national interests that precede and survive their tenures.
Recent Political Asylum Refugees
Year Ceiliing Actual
2013 70,000 69,925
2014 70,000 69,987 Wave of Central American refugees.
2015 70,000 69,993
2016 85,000 84,995 Last year of Obama Administration
2017 110,000 53,716 First year of Trump Administration
2018 45,000 15,383 (est. ytd)
Mr. Trump’s administration now faces a new recourse dilemma triggered by a toughening of US policy in the direction of “enhanced scrutiny”, or using media’s adopted the hyperbole term from school politics, “zero tolerance” policies on the border. In Mr. Trump’s case, the shift in policy has run into same double-edged sword that beset his predecessor. The problem is triggered by a mismatch in timing in how US law works.
The US Immigration and Nationality Act (I.N.A.) § 208(d)(5) states that asylum interviews should take place within 45 days after the date the application is filed, typically the day a person presents themselves to US authorities, and a decision should be made on the asylum application within 180 days after the date the application is filed, unless there are exceptional circumstances.
The stress on the system today, as it was in Obamas time, is that there’s a Judicial Branch court order that impinges upon the I.N.A. timeline. It starts in 1985 when the daughter of actor Ed Asner’s housekeeper was detained by the then US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Her name was Jenny Flores. Jenny’s father had been killed in El Salvador and she was attempting to join her mother in the US, an illegal immigrant worker in the employ of Mr. Asner. The case exposed a problem of long term indeterminate detentions of minors in inadequate facilities within the INS system.
Initially adjudicated in 1987 during the Reagan Administration, it wound up a decade later in 1997 at the US Supreme Court where the Clinton Administration agreed to a settlement, the Flores Settlement, that would have far reaching implications. The Flores Settlement bars the detention of minors for more than 20 days and requires that children be held in facilities licensed as state-approved daycare centers, barring special circumstances.
This mismatch of timing caused Mr. Obama to take mothers as hostages because he could not get the courts to budge and is now causing Mr. Trump to pursue political lighting rod changes to US law. As part of the Executive Order to detain families together, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions is once again asking the US courts to adjustment the Flores Settlement. Mr. Trump is trying to avoid Mr. Obama’s jewelry solution; but he’s got to go through the US 9th District Circuit, one of the most activist in the country. My guess is it won’t end well.
That’s not the problem. This is! We are dealing with these people on the wrong border.
The international law on asylum is that the asylum seeker is supposed to present themselves to the authorities of the first international border they reach upon fleeing their countries. For Central Americans, that country is Mexico; specifically, the southern border of Mexico. The way it is supposed to work, that country, with aid from the international community, is supposed to set up refugee camps. It is from these camps, that other organizations such as the US Office for Refugee Resettlement are supposed to process persons to qualify them for movement from the camps to a third host nation. If this were the Middle East, the analogy would be people in Iraq and Syria fleeing ISIS going to U.N. camps in Jordan.
I do not understand why the US is not insisting that these conventions be followed. This is not a money issue. The US is a rich enough nation that we have the money to support such refugee camps unilaterally; heck, we pay for most of them around the world as it is. They are a good idea given that other Central and South American countries teeter on the edge of collapse of the kind that can and will lead to mass exodus.
One would think that the U.N. Commission on Human Rights would be all over this. BUT NO! Ok, so the U.N. are a bunch of useless puds as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley are quick to explain. Well fine then. To heck with the U.N., there’s the option of solving this as an Organization of American States (OAS) issue where, again, the North American economies can well afford to implement asylum infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere without needing help from the rest of the planet thank you very much.. Why is this not a top of mind conversation? Why is this not part of the media narrative? Why isn't this what gets asked about on in Congressional hearings?
Personally, I’d advice President Trump to go all out on Mexico using trade and tariff leverage while offering the carrot of relief if Mexico cooperates in doing its part to set up proper refugee infrastructure to make the Organization of American States Great Again … so to speak.
Thursday, June 14, 2018
Double Standards, Leadership Hubris, Softened Professional Walls Bring Out Human Frailty at the FBI
The Inspector General’s Report finally arrived. The long-awaited proof of the powerful conspiracy to whitewash the “gross negligence” of Hillary Clinton. On first pass, it’s a bit of an anticlimax play that speaks so much about the frailty of man in the face of power as Thomas Jefferson used to put it.
Dramatically, the saddest part in the 528-page report is a direct action by a Clinton. Specifically, former President Willian Jefferson Clinton, imposing himself in a meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. The meeting “went on and on” saying nothing. It created discomfort to the point that Lynch sought the advice of the ethics counsel and ultimately steeled herself to accept whatever the FBI recommended be done about Mrs. Clinton. The reading between the lines is clear. This chapter of the report is a love poem. It’s a story about a man who knows the woman he loves has done something terribly wrong begging for mercy; how the mighty do have feet of clay.
But it’s also clear in this report that the double standard of behavior for public figures is a chasm from the public's. The IG’s report’s preamble goes to great pains to says it avoids second guessing the course and outcome of the Clinton email investigation. It mentions, but does not opine, on the pattern of mitigation of interpretation of US law that ultimately not only resulted in a declination to recommend prosecution but the removal of language in describing the offense that would have argued strongly in the opposite direction. My fairness opinion on this after reading the applicable law is that someone should have gone to jail for violating 28 CFR 793(f), the "gross negligence" provision. That public figures get a pass on actions that would send ordinary Americans to federal prison is a cancer that begs introspection.
The eye of this storm in this report was James Comey. He is the central actor in the play. The one who’s choices caused everything else to pivot around. The IG report is not wishy washy at all about its conclusion that Comey screwed the pooch twice by acting out of school when he should have followed procedure. Both times he committed failures of hubris speaking out of turn and bypassing chain of command. The IG is correct in counseling that he should have gone by the book and let the external realities of the case wreak whatever havoc they should have. The bottom line lesson for the future is that it’s better to let legitimate scandals happen than create artificial ones inside your own head. It undermines trust and is an example of elitism in DC at its worst. Sadly, it’s also petty. If Comey had trusted in the design of how government and law are supposed to work in this country, much of this would have been different. In theatric translation, where Loretta turned a deaf ear to Bill, Jim gave Hillary his heart. Jim chose poorly.
As a result of Comey’s choices, the FBI was reduced to mediocrity, not by bad personnel, but by aimless purpose. That the IG found so many actions questionable and unconvincing should be no surprise; when you don't have equal protection under the law, clarity turns to mud. Governance and law give way to politics and gossip; an entire country takes a ride on a roller coaster it didn’t have to. And here we are still in denial that 28 CFR 793(f) needs to be enforced.
As to the many supporting actors, Washington D.C. is a town of dangerous political diversity. It remains best navigated with bourbon and cigars. There's nothing wrong with this. The system is designed to operate well as long as the wall between private like and professional conduct is maintained. Most people do so in the Beltway even as they enjoy the salacious aspects of capitol culture. That players will falter here and there is normal. Catching and counseling them is normal too. I did not really see that there was much more than common garden variety human frailty at work here. Lovers get careless and mix play with their work. That doesn’t make them bad people. Gossip worthy yes; but not enemies of the state. The system has the capacity to tolerate such humanity and keep working as long as leadership insists on professionalism in official activity. The lessons documented in this part of the IG report applies beyond just the FBI. The IG is right to call for tighten up the ship.
Sound general quarters. It’s time for drills.
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Does Political Correctness Cause School Shootings? An Inconvenient Question for the Federal Commission on School Safety
In March 2018, following a shooting incident in Parkland, Florida,
President Donald Trump formed the cabinet level Federal Commission on School
Safety charged with coming up with a range of recommendations to improve school
safety. Chaired by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the commission also
includes Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Health and Human Services Secretary
Alex Azar, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. The commission has
formally met once and is to deliver a set of proposals to the President by the
end of the year.
As the commission does its work, constituencies of every
kind seek to influence it. From Congress and its lobbyists through the grass
roots of Americans, people hope the answers that soothe them the most will be
the ones that prevail in the final recommendations. I’m not so sanguine about
finding better tomorrows within knee jerk responses. I believe that the Commission
will not truly have done its work unless it fully deconstructs the pieces of
how America got here, identifies the operative errors we made to our cultural
norms, and explains the root causes and solutions to the American people. Anything
short of that is a placebo.
In the 1990’s, I remember having a poignant conversation with
James Q. Wilson, then a professor at my alma mater, the Anderson Graduate
School of Management at UCLA. Jim was a world class intellectual able to see
out of the box on strategic, cultural and law enforcement matters. I met him
first as a teacher. It turned out he and I shared a common past in strategic nuclear
warfare and would find additional common paths to walk in the realm of developing
theories about community policing. In both cases, he was the academic and I was
the practitioner. He analyzed with words, I analyzed with computer code. Both
paths led to deeper understandings about the insides of Pandora’s Boxes. This conversation
was about the phenomenon of political correctness.
The rise of political correctness or PC as it was referred
to then has roots deep in the Ivory Towers of social engineering. It was a
product of arrogant elitism by people who believed they knew better than
ordinary people. They had identified American Culture itself as the impediment
to their dreams; that lack of cultural cadence that infuriated deeply felt existential
and Marxist beliefs that find so much nurture in the safe spaces of tenured academia.
They correctly recognized that the only way to defeat that enemy was to asymmetrically
attack this culture. Thus, the strategy of deconstruction of language and
meaning began, innocuously at first; but growing in rigidity over time. I remember
the key word of the entire thing. The term “shouldn’t” became “mustn’t”. The attack
vector to spread this cultural breakdown and remaking of America was obvious,
the unprotected and vulnerable educational system. Wilson was always quick to
point out that this was exactly how you created “systemic risks”. He was fond
of saying whatever we teach today will be the social crisis a quarter century from now. From the mid-1990’s, it’s now been over 25 years.
Ivory Fortresses,
Thought Prisons
Some perspective about the sheer power of asymmetric effect of
education on US society is in order here. Where the US military indoctrinates
3% of the US population in to a culture of service, the school system
indoctrinates 100% of America’s children.
In the decades since PC emerged, the schools have turned the
concept of “mustn’t” into Orwellian zero tolerance. The deconstruction of American
culture where tradition is vile and conventional values are evil have become
pervasive. A student or teacher who believes outside the sanctioned thought lives
an insular existence in a hostile workplace at best, is a bullied outcast at
worst. Expression is punishable, both socially and academically. Values and
norms, even those perfectly acceptable off campus, must be left at the gate by
children who’s mental development knows nothing of the abstract post-doctoral concepts
being forced upon them; it’s like using a sledgehammer to crack walnuts open, you
destroy things in the process. They are too young to know that within a setting
that purports to be a haven for their bodies and minds, they are in fact, closer
to being like political prisoners or hostages in much the same sense that
conquerors throughout history have sought to wipe out cultures. These children
are too innocent to see that their families’ values, the things that make them
happy, the things that make them unique, are the system’s enemy.
As that conversation in the 1990’s asked, “What happens when
that school systems sees the America outside the Ivory Bubble as the enemy at
the gate? How does that affect those young minds to be told that their parents
are bad people because they think differently? That ideas are evil." Well of
course it makes the children uncomfortable; they have real feelings and understand rejection. And statistically, when you
deliberately make impressionable people uncomfortable, some of them will get
angry, and some of them will lash out. This doesn’t just happen in schools; it
happens in work places, it happens in the streets. It happens because someone
who thought they knew better pushed the most vulnerable outcasts into the desperate
corners of their minds; and probably fueled that angst with psychotropic
medications. It’s wrong.
I respectfully suggest that, in our bullish brashness, we may
have inadvertently made the perfect storm for school shootings. We created a
systemic risk to America that’s become a perfect laboratory where we take lost children,
so far mostly boys, who are vulnerable to stress and push them over the edge. Their
needs often neglected at home, we set up the system to neglect their needs at
school; indeed, we set up the system to reject the validity of their
existences.
And it gets worse. As parents who can afford to pull their
children out of public schools to put them either into private schools or home
schooling, the concentration of distressed youths per capita in the remaining
zero tolerance environment gets even higher. And these unwanted young people become
valuable economic commodities on campuses because the public education system in
this country gets paid by the body. This means we exacerbate the problem year
by year essentially condemning those who cannot escape financially to the full
force of zero’er tolerance; think of it as the quantitative easing of young impressionable
minds. The dissonant cultures of outcast America are forced to collide within
the walls of the educational keep, every rejection and pain filled day. And we
wonder why kids snap? Let’s admit something to ourselves. We are bullying our
children to make theoretical elitism feel good.
Maybe we won’t be such politically correct monsters this time.
Monday, May 14, 2018
Playing Hardball to Create Peace in the Middle East
On the same day the United States opens its new embassy in
Jerusalem, Hamas sends dozens to die in suicidal waves on the Israeli border
with Palestine. Both moves are statements; one strategic, the other desperate. Seemingly
at odds, when combined, the Middle East is saying it’s time to move on. In
asymmetric stokes, the United States is declaring that the past is the past;
that there is no peace in it; that the road ahead is new, unpaved, and uncharted.
Hamas, one of the vestiges of that past, screams in agony that the ears in the
region have gone deaf to their pleas.
Changing the Game
The Middle East of the latter half of the 20th
Century and dawn of the 21st has been a multi-party matrix of
polarities based on volatile combinations of highly charged win-lose scenarios.
This is not an area where win-win diplomacy has worked well. It is also not an
area peace by force has provided anything more that temporary respite. Mostly,
the Middle East’s core competency is grinding human flesh into meat. Both
taking life and losing life have become commodities measured in hundreds of
thousands of graves. Planet Earth has seen hundreds of thousands of innocent
lives taken over the hubris of greed and power. Cousins turn into blood feud
enemies. Neighbors on one day turn guns on each other the next. The reasons are
many, almost all are pointless. Dreams of influence and power, control of trade
and natural resources, ethnic cleansing for the sake of religious intolerance; all
it’s done is left too many women who sell flowers and little boys who sell ice
cream dead in forgotten ditches or splattered like paint onto the rubble of
explosive debris. These examples are not fiction. Diplomacy, the kind that
talks but does not act, has done little but keep the killing fields fertile.
Creating paths to peace requires choosing winners
arbitrarily. Not by promoting self-determination; we already know the warring
parties there’s choice is to perpetuate death as their coin of negotiation. Frankly,
it’s how they milk the system. No. If we want real peace we need to take endless
negotiation out of the equation. The world, or rather the powerful of the
world, need to pick the outcomes and the pathways to manage the fate of the losers.
Benevolent Manifest Destiny
The Machiavellian model here is not democracy, it’s the
marshaling of resources to impose better outcomes. The analogy that comes to
mind is the taming of the American West. The latter 1800’s in America was a
period when wars as a tool of statecraft were ending and the rule of law began
to eclipse armies of occupation. The tool used for this was the US Circuit
Court system of judges and marshals that had the power, in their individually
jurisdictions to declare parties legitimate or outlaws; and enforce order under
the shield of law accordingly. It eventually turned territories onto states
that became self-governing with individually unique qualities; the American
West the world knows today.
Let’s look at one facet of this puzzle. The clearest case
for this ahead is in the country of Syria where stability is probably only
possible by sectoring the country into imposed districts.
Northwestern Syria, the section held by Bashar al-Assad and
this Alawites, is the new East Germany. It’s district judge is Russia. Its
problem is the purging of what’s left of al-Qaeda and its various expressions
of al Nusra and ISIS. Caught in this crossfire are the non-Alawite democratic
factions that used to be part of a more inclusive Syria of a few decades ago
but are in constant danger of teetering into the clutches of warlords who might
turn the region into another Afghanistan. The conflict metaphor here is the sectarian
governance of the Alawite model vs. the heavy-handed Salafist model of al
Qaeda. The question for the world is how to enable the district judge to
succeed in making sure the Alawite model prevails and northwestern Syria moves
past the human rights sins of both Assad and his Islamist foes while seeking
the restoration of broader inclusiveness in a post-Assad northwestern Syria. The
latter is a challenge because the designated judge, Russia, isn’t exactly the most
inclusive or tolerant of players.
Southern Syria is the section occupied by the Iranians. This
is the westernmost projection of what is called the Shia Crescent, Imam
controlled Iran’s dream of regional Middle East dominion. It is the powder keg
and flash point of Middle East instability. The inability of Iran to get to the
shores of the Mediterranean because the path is blocked to the west by the
Israelis has been marked by military posturing and dueling that shows no sign
of abating. This is metaphor here is immovable trench warfare. The only actual
solutions are for either (a) Iran to abandon its agenda or (b) Israel and Iran
to reach a peaceful armistice that allows for constructive economic conditions
to emerge. For that, cooler heads, particularly in Iran, need to prevail. This
is not presently feasible. Oddly, the decision of the US to abandon the 2014 Nuclear
Treaty with Tehran actually creates a new basis for resolving the southern
Syria issue by opening a pathway to tie Tehran’s regional behavior not just in
Syria but in the Nineveh Plains of Iraq to a new round of negotiations. The
gambit is reinforced by the US overture inviting participation by Saudi Arabia
and the Gulf States, who are showing encouraging signs of liberalizing
proactively, to help stabilize eastern Syria. The move, in military parlance,
closes a salient created by the Iranians during the ISIS period further pushing
them to an inevitable negotiated outcome. This is bold move stuff being pushed
by cool cucumbers like US president Donald Trump and his team. A second Nobel
Peace Prize would be well earned if it works.
Eastern Syria is the American sector. This is about as close
as it gets to the frontier conditions of the American West of the 1800’s; where
the American military occupies and patrols in a role more akin the the U.S.
Cavalry of the Wild West. We sit on a powder keg on the knife edge of military
governorship. And regionally, this is the most difficult sector to possess. Where
western and southern Syria are set piece containments, eastern Syria harbors a
flashpoint for a far broader regional breakdown. It’s because of the Kurds. A
partner to facilitating America’s occupation agenda, the dream of an
independent Kurdistan holds within it a war that would engulf Syria, Turkey and
Iraq for a century. It may be ok with the Kurds who see only their hopes with
myopic intensity; but everyone else who looks into this abyss sees casualty
numbers that would equal if not exceed what the region has already suffered. The
US has counseled both patience to the Kurds, difficultly, and accommodation by
the sovereign nations within which the Kurds live, with even more difficulty. It
will test the United States’ ability to reluctantly manage conflicting party coexistence
over a long term yet again. On the plus side, there is probably no other nation
on earth whose own history of being forged out of diverse dissonance can ascend.
Perhaps that is why God has placed us in that part of the His former Garden of
Eden at this point in human history.
We do stand a chance at this. The philosophy of “nation
building” American-style has been applied in other tumultuous environments with
success. The United States, under the command of Douglas MacArthur, used
similar methods to stabilize the post-Spanish Empire colony of the Philippine
Islands in the early 20th Century. MacArthur, a product of a
flowering of other statesmen-generals like Marshall, Eisenhower, and others who
saw the world stage as manageable, repeated the formula again in post-Imperial
Japan after World War II. The United States, post MacArthur, did the same in a
place called South Korea; a country that is about to bear the fruits of America’s
sixty-eight (68) years of patience and commitment. Anyone who tries to tell you
the USA doesn’t have the ability or skill to play the long game, don’t you
believe it. We have, many times.
The only times we’ve lost on this planet is when we’ve
abandoned and left regions to wallow in their own misery. The vacuum effect of
our missing influence has been consistent; slow economic recovery in places
strewn with uncleared minefields and, in too many instances, death due to gang
warfare between criminal warlords. We’ve learned a little that our choices have
consequences, probably not enough. But maybe enough to give the world a few
more miracles to remember.
I’ll close by noting that I’ve written about his subject in
the past. The last time I pointed out that the United States must ponder the
long-term implications of our destiny on the world stage was 2003. At the time,
we were arguing about the weapons of mass destruction of one Saddam Hussein and
debating whether to invade Iraq. I wrote we’d have to have the stomach to stay
for at least 75 years to do it right. I recall at that time there was another
fellow being quoted as saying similarly pensive things.
His name was Donald J. Trump.
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