Saturday, January 7, 2017

McCain and CNN urgently call for war

Much as I respect McCain and CNN, when they are within their spheres of competence, I am aghast at how seriously and dangerously they both are departing from reality this morning.  The effort to create war between US and Russia (to the benefit of the Moslem Brotherhood and all those who get funded and/or guided by them around the world) is an extremely serious matter, and if we fail to think twice we are all in deep trouble – all us humans.

First key point: McCain says that Russia has performed an act of war, and that the US CANNOT just sit back and let anyone get away with that.

I understand where he is coming with that. I took a graduate course on formal deterrence and game theory under Schelling, and one of Hermann Kahn’s seminars, so I fully understand where is coming from. But we live in a new world now,
and, above all, the borders in cyberspace have simply not been well-defined by anyone. We do need such borders, as a matter of urgency; that is why the technical measures proposed in www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf are objectively a whole lot more urgent and important than all the hacking and terrorism incidents of the past year. But when there are no borders yet... as Clapper very rightly noted in the hearing, we who live in a glass house should not throw stones.

The idea that we should treat this NOW as a classic act of war... reminds me of how visibly hard it was for Mike Rogers of Cybercon to contain his laughter when... one senator... asked for jobs for some of her people, in effect, to show up in foremen’s suits around the Pentagon, to create a cordon to keep out malware. It was so funny! (OK, she was not quite so crazy as that... but for the objective realities of cyberwarfare today... it note just how well he contained his laughter and played her along.)

It is simply not act of war when we don’t have borders. Yes, we need to establish borders... and no it is not enough to build a “Maginot Line”... but we can and urgently need to strengthen that kind of border before we get too far into things which work only after such borders are established.

The CNN commentator attacking Trump was also very deeply troubling to me. I do not care about insults to Trump the way he might himself... but I can see how some OTHER people, reacting  just as emotionally to what they perceive as insults to them, can also be extremely dangerous. In fact, calm and suave as they may imagine themselves to be, calmly and suaving asking for a return to Cold War and even asking for immediate hostile actions against Russia instantly and urgently...
well, that’s actually more dangerous than anything Trump has called for (yet). (Sadly, Kim of the North might yet get hTrump’s goat on a major scale.... though I wish he could just invite Kim to a Hefner bash instead, or, failing that, to see who else might be ready to just annex North Korea with full US support. Still, even nuclear war with North Korea would be less dangerous that war with Russia to the benefit of Moslem Brotherhood!)

I wondered what kind of mental hospital we are in when people are lying dead in Fort Lauderdale and another giant sexual assault riot has broken out in the German world, and the CNN commentator tells us to ignore all these irrelevant distraction and get to the really urgently need to attack Russia. Just what does he think we would gain by doing more than what Obama has already done, by ratcheting things up ever so many levels?

==========================================================================
==========================================

OK, that’s the urgent part. Just the tip of one of about ten icebergs I could see on the watch this early morning....

Should I add any more?

Well, in my last post I admitted that I personally (having no access at all to any material classified anywhere on earth)
could not say for sure that Putin authorized the DNC hacks. My emotional tendency is to expect that he did, but that is just a kind of normal human tendency, in part because the story is so plausible. How could I have any doubt?

Well, I have had a lifetime of learning to doubt. Maybe it started with Howard Raiffa’s class, where he reported survey results showing that what the elites call “impossible” occurs about one-third of the time. (That’s an important story, but I will hold back on details for now.) Life tells me that those heads of agencies (like Clapper) who looked seriously and professionally at the evidence would tend to have a bias here – a bias of not wanting to think hard about those folks WITHIN the US who might well have motive, opportunity and ability to more or less frame Putin. I am NOT asserting that
that is a valid explanation, but, without having data myself to disconfirm it, I do not have such a firm basis for ruling it out.
Certainly I do know that there are folks who want war with Russia and Iran as soon as possible (before the event they fear of Trump/Putin alliance), just as much as they wanted war with Iraq under Cheney. And many of the same networks and people still exist, even though the vast majority of people in any of the US intelligence agencies would much prefer to avoid such unconstitutional “informal” networks.

But still, no one should imagine that a full understanding between Putin and Trump would be a child’s moonlight romance
for either one of them. In a way, it reminds me of the article I read in Psychology Today decades ago about divorces between firstborns, and of how Luda and I need to exercise our full intelligence to do justice to our different complex thoughts and strategic assessments. From Putin, Trump must accept some harsh realities about the thousands of years history of the Middle East. (Hey guys, I read Eisenstadt, not just Spengler and Toynbee and the Russian stuff. It’s not a game of musical chairs. And I did just review Kay’s new book, on one third of the story.) From Trump.. Putin must accept a more mutual face-saving and forward-looking approach to Ukraine proper (not including Crimea). And there are those IT issues I mentioned above.  That really ought to be a god starting foundation.

================

Meanwhile, what of that guy who said he heard voices in his head asking him to watch ISIS propaganda?
If we take that seriously AT ALL, will they lock us up? Just yesterday, I read a review of Eisenbud’s publications on what I have called assumption dreams. The review admitted that Freud himself strongly argued that so-called “paranormal”
phenomena are real, a reality inescapable to folks who really open up and deeply track clinical or deep human psychological experience.  “But that can’t be” say the clerks who now classify socially incongruous laughter or tears as a syndrome to be removed by drugs.   I am now reading, the Dark Forest, the sequel to “Three Body Problem” (Chinese sci fi recommended, by Zuckenberg, Obama and Luda.) I do’t agree with everything it says... but I do agree that if we work hard to become a nation of clerks controlled by IT puppetmasters, we will be doomed...... and yet that some of us must still have some cautions in what we say, especially when some Congresspeople call for a new “fake news bureau” (aka censorship) to keep out all views they disagree with.)





















No comments:

Post a Comment