Trading One Apocalypse for Another

Just a few months ago, a Netherlands researcher wanted to come to the U.S. to present a paper on the vulnerability of the industrial control system. There are almost 30,000 of these devices that control everything from wastewater plants to the electrical grid. The research, thanks to America's arcane and silly visa system, was not admitted and so unable to present these important findings. Fortunately he was able to post them to his blog. Whether that resulted in a wider dissemination of the information than had he delivered his talk is academic, perhaps. **

Researcher Wojciech,  used standard OSINT techniques (the CIA has identified five main OSINT fields: Internet, media, geolocation, conferences, and online pictures) to analyze the exposed ICS devices. Many of these are used in critical infrastructure that would include dams, electrical grid, reactors, health treatment facilities, etc. Critical infrastructure developed by OSINT can be used not just by espionage agencies, but also criminal elements who may seek to gain monetary advantage by holding these devices hostage. OSINT techniques are passive, in that the target remains completely unaware it is being surveilled. Access may be gained by open ports, IP addresses, knowledge of details of the specific devices and how they work -- all freely available online and elsewhere -- and even responses from the device itself.

Here's an example of device information that's available that even includes the phone number: 

There are several programs that permit searching the internet for active ICS devices (https://www.shodan.io for example.) The author lays out precisely how to go about searching. Many of these devices have open management ports that are convenient for technicians to access the devices remotely for maintenance. That, however, makes them extremely vulnerable malicious actors. General contractors with government contracts are particularly vulnerable as they have a history of being more open and thus more vulnerable.

That hackers can cause innumerable problems has already been shown in Ukraine, Estonia, and Georgia where the Russians devastated each country's infrastructure. Andy Greenberg in Sandworm documents what happened in several cases. In Ukraine access to the banking system was eliminated.

It took forty-five seconds to bring down the network of a large Ukrainian bank. A portion of one major Ukrainian transit hub…was fully infected in sixteen seconds. Ukrenergo, the energy company…had also been struck yet again…the effect was like a vandal who first puts a library’s card catalog through a shredder, then moves on to methodically pulp its books, stack by stack. 

US officials, heads typically in the sand, refused to admit something similar could happen in the U.S. yet we now know that Russian hackers infiltrated the U.S. election system and may well have manipulated the outcome in a variety of unorthodox ways. In 2016, Iranian hackers attacked several US banks causing millions in damages and shut down a dam presumably in retaliation for the Stuxnet attack. The attacks themselves were quite unsophisticated, mostly DDoS attacks that even the most unsophisticated hacker can pull off.

There is software (malware, really) that has been designed for specific purposes; Stuxnet is but one example. Another, discovered by the security firm Dragos, was CrashOverride***, only the fourth example of malware designed to attack and manipulate the controllers in electrical grids. "The functionality in the CRASHOVERRIDE framework serves no espionage purpose and the only real feature of the malware is for attacks which would lead to electric outages."

Greenberg shows that a variety of software is available, even for sale, that permits relatively easy access for anyone, but can also be used to hide the origin of the attacker. To make matters worse, Greenberg wrote in Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/plundervolt-intel-chips-sgx-hack/) of researchers who had managed to access and control Intel processors (a vulnerability that has since been fixed) by manipulating the internal voltage of the processor. You can induce faults by lowering or changing the voltage and once you can do that you can change the output by manipulating the faults. The technique, called Plundervolt, was discovered concurrently by a researcher in Beijing. (Take from that what you will.)

In his book, Greenberg focuses on Sandworm, a group of hackers and software named after the malicious creature in Dune (cyber-analysts had discovered that preference while doing research on the code - don't ask me how.)  They determined there was evidence that Sandworm had been infiltrating critical infrastructure—some of it in the United States—since 2011 and had already developed a weapon that could knock it out. When it was used against Ukraine, it had evolved even further. 

The hackers had, in other words, created an automated cyber-weapon that performed the same task they’d carried out the year before, but now with inhuman speed. Instead of manually clicking through circuit breakers with phantom hands, they’d created a piece of malware that carried out that attack with cruel, machine-quick efficiency.

The engineers managed to fix the system in about an hour, but the point was made. Another group calling themselves ShadowBrokers made off with a whole set of penetration tools developed by the NSA (supposedly impenetrable) and turned them loose in the wild where virtually anyone with a modicum of knowledge can make use of them. Shadow Brokers caused immense harm when they released EternalBlue, malware that spread faster than anything anyone had seen before. Within minutes it had disabled pharmaceutical companies, and Maersk, the huge shipping company was brought to its knees. 

 “ 'For days to come, one of the world’s most complex and interconnected distributed machines, underpinning the circulatory system of the global economy itself, would remain broken,” Greenberg writes of the attack on Maersk, calling it “a clusterfuck of clusterfucks.” The company was only able to get its ships and ports back in operation after nearly two weeks and hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, when an office in Ghana was found to have the single computer that hadn’t been connected to the Internet at the time of the attack.' "

I've been reading a lot of books and articles on the possibilities of cyber-warfare. The potential is there for even non-state actors to operate in the shadows and do tremendous harm. Then again shutting down most of our industry might solve the global warming worst case scenarios. One apocalypse preventing another.

**https://www.icscybersecurityconference.com/intelligence-gathering-on-u-s-critical-infrastructure/

***For a review of CrashOverride designed to attack electricity grids, see https://dragos.com/wp-content/uploads/CrashOverride-01.pdf

Review: A Lily of the Field by John Lawton

Finally finished this. The early scenes with the young Méret as she studies with Vicktor are often lyrical, helped perhaps by the numerous allusions to classical music. If you love the classics you will enjoy those references. It's 1934 through the beginning of the war in Austria at the start. The Nazis have begun to show their true colors and some Jews who had already fled Germany were now trying to get to England. I love the way Lawton describes the English naïveté: "Think of them as children. Think of Europe as the drawing room and England as the kindergarten of Europe. They are innocents. They actually boast of not having been invaded since 1066. When in fact all that means is that they have lived outside the mainstream of Europe. They are innocents.. . .Good God, why London? Why not Paris or Amsterdam? What does London have to offer? The madman Thomas Beecham. Beecham waving his baton in the pouring rain for a nation of philistines in wet wool and false teeth!”

But I thought the book dragged once they all got to England and I just didn't find it as interesting nor comprehensible.

Another Pseudo Maelstrom in the YA World

Sarah Dessen is a self-described YA author who recently twittered herself into a maelstrom of controversy. She had taken issue with a student at a small South Dakota university who had recommended Just Mercy (an excellent book by Bryan Stevenson) and several other adult books to be placed on the school's Common Read list as an alternative to one of Dessen's books, which she felt, as a YA book, was not up the appropriate college reading level.

Brooke Nelson, the student, noted in an email to the author of a Slate article that "“In 2017, I was a college junior who joined a committee because I wanted to have a voice in what text was selected for a college reading program. I was only one vote on a large committee of college students, faculty, staff, and community members.” 

What happened was that Dessen clipped a piece from an article in the university's newspaper and tweeted a sarcastic comment about it to her 260,000 followers. The inevitable reaction is a case of classic YA juvenile behavior that amounted to nothing less than extreme bullying. YA author Siobhan Vivian tweeted, “Fuck that fucking bitch.” (“I love you,” Dessen replied.) Fellow YA writer Dhonielle Clayton chimed in: “Can I add a few more choice words for Siobhan’s brilliance … fuck that RAGGEDY ASS fucking bitch.” Vivian replied with the clapping, cigarette, and nail-painting emoji."

The juvenile and scatological content of the comments are unfortunately representative of the YA crowd. Just check out the YA stuff on Goodreads and you'll find a viciousness one would hope to be characteristic of teenagers rather than adult authors pretending to be teens in their writing.

Nelson has deleted her social media presence in an attempt to hide from the viciousness and worries it may impact her future career. The reaction of Northern State University was disappointing. “We are very sorry to @SarahDessen for the comments made in a news article by one of our alums,” the school wrote. “They do not reflect the views of the university or Common Read Committee.” The lesson one takes from that statement is that students there need not have any opinions. 

A larger issue, and one that bugs me constantly, is the somewhat arbitrary designation of books as YA or adult. There are many teenagers who read at above grade levels and many so-called YA books that deal with adult issues. The are books written for younger readers and then books about teens. One can imagine a lengthy debate, as intense as the one over the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, as to whether Jane Eyre, Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, and innumerable others should be shelved in the YA section where adults readers and those wishing to read "adult" book will never find them. The categories become even more ridiculous when aimed at ages. "This book is for those from ages 7-8." Ridiculous, but parents and administrators demand those designations, assuming that reading levels are monolithic and immutable and change from one age to another. Authors are told to remove words that are appropriate to the story but which may not meet some mythic age or reading level. 

It's perhaps ironic that had Dessen never said that she wrote for teens (and after all what does she know about teens, not having been one for several years) but about teen issues as she understands them, or better issues of justice or racism, something Nelson wanted to emphasize, 

Methena v Malvo

In 2012, in Miller v Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that awarding a life sentence without parole to a juvenile violated the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 2016, the court, in Montgomery v Louisiana amplified that ruling by ruling that because Miller was substantive, i.e. of constitutional import, that the prohibition against life sentences without parole for juveniles was retroactive. This time Roberts added his vote to the 5-4 Miller decision making it 6-3. “When the Court establishes a substantive constitutional rule, that rule must apply retroactively because such a rule provides for constitutional rights that go beyond procedural guarantees.”

Come to the present case of Methena v Malvo. Malvo, at the time, 17 years old, was convicted of participating in the sniper shootings in Virginia in 2002. His older colleague was sentenced to death and executed in 2009. In Malvo’s case, the jury was asked to decide between the death penalty and life without parole. They chose the latter. Then along came Miller and Montgomery and Malvo’s lawyers are asking that since Montgomery made the prohibition retroactive, that Molvo’s sentences (he had ten life sentences) be vacated. Much of the questioning revolved around the issue of just using youth as a criteria, or whether incorrigibility, needed to be considered, as well.

It seemed to me rather straightforward given the outcome in Montgomery, but trying to guess how the justices would vote was not apparent from the oral arguments. Of course Scalia and Kennedy, both there for Miller and Montgomery, have been replaced by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, but with Roberts the deciding vote plus one in Montgomery I would have to guess they might send it back to the 4th Circuit that had ruled for Malvo to bring in the idea of incorrigibility and the distinction between mandatory sentences of life as opposed to simply the application of a life sentence without parole. Semantics, indeed.

https://qr.ae/TWx5Po The following is an answer by Salman Khan found on Quora to the question: "Do atheists secretly or inwardly pray to God in their moments of desperation? Who do they look to when all seems lost?"

I will actually give a serious response to a question like this!

I’ve seen people complaining about such questions and how annoying they are. It occurred to me that I could actually write serious responses to such questions and try and make this site a better place. So, are you ready?

Do atheists secretly or inwardly pray to God in their moments of desperation?

The short answer to your question is no. For the long answer, please keep reading.

It doesn’t actually surprise me that some believers might feel like we need to pray to something in our darkest hours. I don’t really blame them. I understand why they feel that way. They were probably raised in a way that they never got to develop a coping mechanism. Despite being raised by Muslim parents, I didn’t suffer through that. I was taught by my parents to deal with reality on reality’s terms. If I needed something, I was taught to work for it. If my work failed, I was taught to reflect on it and learn from it and never make the same mistake twice. Never was I asked to not put in any effort and hope some magic will solve things for me.

Don’t get me wrong! I was taught to pray to God. However, prayer was taught to me as a form of humility, not as a means to a desired end. As such, I never relied on prayers to get anything done. Therefore, logically, I had no reason to resort to praying if things got really difficult. Maybe your parents/teachers/pastors/imam taught you differently. Maybe they taught you to ask for miracles to solve your problems. As such, you probably see no option but to ask for a miracle when things get tough.

The thing is, even if I did believe in a God, I’d still not pray to them in my darkest hour. Why? Well, please consider the following. Some 21,000 people starve to death on this planet everyday! Most of them are kids. A God that refuses to hand a sandwich to these poor souls should not be expected to show up to solve my life problems. I mean, what would praying to such a God make me seem like? How much arrogance must my heart harbor for me to think that the same God who refuses to save those 21,000 people from starvation even takes interest in my problems?

For these reasons, people like me don’t pray and wouldn’t have prayed even if there was a God.

Who do they look to when all seems lost?

We engage in some introspection. We talk to friends/family. Sometimes we talk to strangers too. That way, we share things and somehow it makes us feel better.

Actually, it’s not only about the emotional comfort that we get out of it. Often times, our social network can actually help us out of such situations. People don’t need to be Gods to offer to help you. Even a total stranger can change your life and pull you out of your misery. As far as I am aware, people have a higher track record of helping other people than any God ever did. Please look at the above image. When your God sent Hurricane Katrina to drown those kids and devastate the lives of people, it was people who came together to save them.

That is why people like me don’t feel the need to look up to such Gods for anything. If anything, we look up to our fellow mortals. We respect such mortals who may be limited in their abilities but does more to help us than the seemingly impotent and potentially evil Gods.

Review: Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All by Arthur Holland Michael

It wasn't long into the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that Rumsfeld realized the quantum difference between earlier wars and the new situation. Formerly, satellites and airplanes would take still pictures which would then be analyzed and bombed or whatever. Airfields and buildings did not move so there was time. Even tanks moving on a road had limited options where they might proceed and their speed was easily known. Now, the bad actors didn't even belong to a state, they were an amorphous group of individuals who could disappear from a location with the start of an ignition.

Predator drones had been around for a while and had increased in sophistication. They could now fly higher and had cameras with resolution such that they could pick out an earring from 20,000 feet. What Rumsfeld wanted was video to follow a moving target. Enter "Stare". These video cameras coupled with a drone like the Predator could follow a man for hours, circle and wait if need be. One great missed opportunity was the targeting of Osama Bin Laden before 9/11. He was spotted and followed but for some unexplained reason it was decided not to fire on him. A lost opportunity, but then perhaps it was figured he hadn't done anything yet.

Technical problems in developing the Gorgon Stare were overcome by melding commercial hardware and software. Cell phone cameras were linked together in an array that provided 176 times the megapixel of just one cell camera and then they discovered the best software for manipulating the huge number of images the cameras collected was in video game boxes. The result was stunning.

The result was wide-area extremely sensitive cameras and recording. It has been tested by several agencies under the guise of those manufacturing the devices, usually done in secret because of fears the public might not be especially receptive to the idea of being under constant surveillance. Proponents point to assorted successes: catching bad guys after crimes have been committed by following them back to their dwellings, maximizing resources in wildfires, traffic control in real time, even something as prosaic as helping drivers find parking spots at large events. NASCAR hired one to watch over a race and the operator, bored to tears, realized after watch a car spend two hours trying to find a parking place when he could see several available, that had drivers had access to his information, and they had purchased just one soda during the time saved, that NASCAR would have paid the fee for the surveillance several times over.

There are myriad uses for such wide-area-surveillance, the technology for which has exploded. It used to be thought that 100 megapixels (your phone camera has about 10 megapixels) would be plenty. The latest model now sports 40 GIGApixels and there is no end in sight. The cameras are smaller, the processing power and storage cheaper. The civilian applications are numerous. One demonstration over an unnamed city in the south suggested the expensive (but getting cheaper) flights could pay for themselves in catching traffic violations. Hit-and-run drivers were identified as were the causes of accidents not to mention blown through stop signs and traffic signals. Another use has been to monitor the health of underground pipelines. The technology is already there to share usage, so you could have firefighters monitoring wild fires while others watched traffic patterns, and still others looked for crimes being committed especially now that artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated and able to make split-second decisions.

A good book to read in connection with Paul Scharre's An Army of None [book:Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War|40180025]. It's fascinating if a bit frightening; another case of technology outstripping policy. (Bear in mind the Supreme Court is populated with justices who don't know how to use email.)

Check out https://www.pss-1.com/what-is-wide-area-surveillance

Ramos v Louisiana: Stare Decisis, the 14th Amendment, and Unanimous Juries

For decades only two states have required less than unanimity in criminal jury trials. The constitutionality of that was affirmed in a case called Abodaca v Oregon (1972) in a 4-1-4 split decision, with Justice Powell being the deciding justice, ruling that the 6th Amendment was not incorporated to the states by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

You will remember that until the 14th Amendment, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and not to the states. It remained for John Bingham and the 39th Congress to attempt to have them apply to the states through the Privileges or Immunities Clause. I say “tried” because the Supreme Court was reluctant to interpret the way Bingham and the 39th Congress intended until the mid-twentieth century when the due process clause of the 14th was used to selectively apply the Bill of Rights to the states. By 1972, most of the 10 amendments had been applied to the states. After Abodaca the parts of the 6th remained applicable only to the federal government. [Note that Clarence Thomas has been a proponent of using the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th to apply all of the Bill of Rights to the states rather than use the selective due process clause in what he regards as a haphazard manner.(4)

What to do about Abodaca has been the subject of recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Ramos v Louisiana. Louisiana and Oregon are the only two states that have not required a unanimous verdict in criminal jury trials. That changed when two years ago when Louisiana changed its law and now requires a unanimous verdict. Note that the Constitution does not require a unanimous verdict, only “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." The Court has interpret this to require a unanimous verdict, at least in federal courts.

Ramos, who was convicted in a 10-2 verdict and sentenced to life, but who has maintained his innocence, argued that a unanimous verdict is essential to fair trial, that non-unanimous jury verdicts are unconstitutional, especially given the disparity between federal and state requirements, and that Apodaca should be overturned, hence the discussion of stare decisis, the principle that judges should follow precedent whenever possible. Apodaca was a precedent set by just one justice and that, too, came up in oral arguments.

The origin of non-unanimous verdicts was dissected in an article in the New Republic (1) Louisiana and Oregon have conviction rates much higher than other states and needing only ten of twelve jurors to agree is one reason why. “Anyone charged with a crime in Louisiana is more likely to be convicted than in any other state, save Oregon (which also has a non-unanimous criminal jury standard), by a factor of one in six,” Valdosta State University history professor Thomas Aiello wrote in a recent book documenting the racist origins of the Louisiana rule. “If someone is charged with a crime on the western bank of the Mississippi River, he or she has a 17 percent better chance of being convicted than if charged on the eastern bank.”

The adoption of the rule flowed from the passage of the 14th Amendment, that forced the state to include black people in juries. Since Louisiana required juries to reach unanimous decisions, as was standard, this meant a single black person on the jury would have a lot of power — which would weaken white Louisianans’ hold over the state, its government, and its laws. “This was part of the 1898 constitutional convention, which is famous for disenfranchising black voters,” Lawrence Powell, a historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, told me. “It was also around the time of the Plessy [v. Ferguson] case that just got sanction from the US Supreme Court for racial segregation. It’s all part of that mix.” Because race was not explicitly stated as the reason for the non-unanimous rule, the Supreme Court had always given it a pass even though at the 1898 convention when it was adopted, racial reasons were explicitly stated: “The goal, said Kruttschnitt, was the ‘purification of the electorate.’ The Judiciary Committee Chair, Judge Thomas Semmes, was more blunt. He declared that the purpose was ‘to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done....’” (2)

Louisiana changed its constitution in 2018 to require unanimous jury decisions. It was not retroactive.

The origin of Oregon’s rule is more recent but equally fraught. Angry with the failure to convict a Jewish gangster of murder, nativist and anti-semitic feelings prevailed and a felony conviction now required only an 11-1 or 10-2 vote by a jury. It has also been argued since that not requiring a unanimous verdict is far more expeditious.

The Apodaca decision that Louisiana and Oregon want upheld was unusual in that Powell, who wrote the prevailing opinion, couched it in very narrow terms, not completely allying himself with either countervailing group, one for upholding the unanimous requirement, the other not. “There is no reason to believe, on the basis of experience in Oregon or elsewhere, that a unanimous decision of 12 jurors is more likely to serve the high purpose of jury trial, or is entitled to greater respect in the community, than the same decision joined in by 10 members of a jury of 12,” Powell wrote. (3) He joined with Blackmun, White, Burger, and Rehnquist in upholding the Oregon law. The decision also revealed incredible naivete: “Jury unanimity is not mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment requirements that racial minorities not be systematically excluded from the jury selection process; even when racial minority members are on the jury, it does not follow that their views will not be just as rationally considered by the other jury members as would be the case under a unanimity rule.”(3)

Louisiana and Oregon both filed briefs arguing that stare decisis should prevail. Louisiana’s Attorney General paraded the “horribles” scenario that those convicted prior to the state’s adoption of the unanimous requirement would all seek new trials. (Ramos had appealed his conviction before Louisiana adopted the new rule.) Oregon argued in its brief that overturning Apodaca would unsettle the law rather than making it more consistent and destablize; that stare decisis should prevail in this case. Of course, the elephant, turning pink in the room, was Roe v Wade. This will be a fascinating case to watch.

1. https://newrepublic.com/article/154884/jim-crow-returns-supreme-court
2. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18052540/election-results-louisiana-amendment-2-unanimous-jim-crow-jury-law
3. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/406/404/
4. https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Blackman_Shapiro_14at150_DRAFT.pdf
“Five short years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court eviscerated the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) held that the provision protects only a fairly narrow subset of federal rights. Two years later, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Court rejected the argument that the right to keep and bear arms, expressly recognized in the Second Amendment, was one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship. With this one-two punch, the cornerstone of the Fourteenth Amendment was forgotten. The Supreme Court would not revisit these decisions until McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). There, only Justice Clarence Thomas was willing to restore the Privilege or Immunities Clause’s original meaning. “

Review: Field of Prey by John Sandford

I worry about Sandford's imagination reading this book and some of the other titles where he inserts the actions and thinking of the bad guys. The killer in this one rapes and kills women and the vividness and detail with which Sandford recounts his actions is beyond chilling; it's obscene and pornographic. There's a vast chasm between erotic pornography that's loving and tender and that which is brutal and sadistic. This is the latter and it's not pleasant. One wonders about a mind that can even think up this stuff. I'm not sure I would want Sandford over for dinner.

There is a side plot (one wonders why it was included at all) involving the brother of a man shot by police during a bank robbery. Lucas is portrayed by the media as celebrating the man's death ("the police showed great restraint" in striking the man with only 20 bullets) and having been involved setting the man up for the shooting. From other comments made during the book, it's clear Sandford despises the media (ironic as Sandford is a pseudonym for John Camp a former journalist), and the name of the brother, "Immanuel Kent" can't possibly be an accident and must be a reference to Immanuel Kant, who gave us the "categorical Imperative" and the moral worth of an individual comes less from the consequences of his actions than from his motivations. Lucas' motivations in warning the police of the bank robbery was good, but the actual consequence was bad. The brother (supported by the media) seems to argue that he should be responsible for the unintended consequences, distinctly un-Kantian.

No need to repeat the plot. Lots of those descriptions available. That said, he has created some interesting characters. Davenport and his sidekicks have become more interesting as the series has progressed. And having Flowers make an appearance never hurts, either. I enjoyed this audio-book which was well read (as ever) by Richard Ferrone. 

Review: A Corporate Tragedy: The Agony of International Harvester Company by Barbara Marsh

A very enjoyable and interesting book that begins with a history of the reaper and its impact on American farming. The McCormick family, descendants of its inventor, built the company through beneficial mergers and clever marketing. Henry Ford was selling his Fordson tractor at a loss to gain market share. Harvester went one better by throwing in a plow, too. Their salesmen would travel around looking for Fordson dealers and demos, offering to match their tractors against Ford's, and they usually won, building a devoted customer base. IH's Farmall line was immensely popular as it was just that, a machine that did it all. It took a multitude of attachments like the 4 row cultivator that saved the farmer a huge number of man-hours. *

I remember driving a Ford 9n on my uncle's dairy farm. It was a small, squat, tractor, useful for hauling wagons and small chores. He also had a Farmall MD (new in 1952); a diesel that used a small gas engine to get it started (the switch over with the lever was very cool), but my favorite was the Oliver 77 (might have been an 88, not sure) that was the absolute best because it had a six-cylinder engine. (I hated the two-cylinder John Deere tractors - they didn't switch to more cylinders until the early sixties. And we won't even talk about the stupid hand clutch.**) To my mind Oliver made the best tractors and only went under because of mismanagement, something that we will see more of in this book.

By the fifties the company was thriving, engaged in supplying multiple markets besides farm machinery, including trucks, home appliances, and industrial machinery. However, several battles on the management and labor side threatened its dominance. There was a management battle between McCaffrey and Fowler McCormack. McCormack had become a devotee of Carl Jung and would spend months each year in Switzerland at the master's feet while McCaffrey fumed in the states. He eventually took his concerns to the board who, much to Fowler's surprise, sided with McCaffrey, relegating McCormick to a titular post. Bad blood between the two continued for years. Unlike Fowler, McCaffrey was a salesman with little feel for reining in sales demands and soon IH was offering its customers 168 different models of trucks driving the factories crazy. 

Harvester had a significant number of farmers who loved red and had the dealer network to support it. They were loyal because of excellent relationships with dealers who often carried them on equipment they needed immediately, but could not pay for right away. However, the company was falling behind John Deere, which produced superior equipment and service. The author also suggests that another reason for their success was the location of Deere's headquarters in Moline, Illinois closer to the farms they served rather than Harvester's dedication to Chicago as headquarters. Deere executives all live(d) on on near farms. They too had a strong dealership network. They did it by coddling the dealers rather than Harvester's tactic of hard sell of forcing dealers to do things their way.

In the meantime the company was also battling unions and the unions were battling each other in a fight between the FE (Farm Equipment union) and the UAW each seeking to oust the other. Strikes were often called just to hurt the other union and in the decade following the war, there were 1,200 work stoppages and 48,000 job grievances between 1954 and 1959. That was unsupportable. In the end, HUAC destroyed the FE whose leaders were investigated for purported Communist activities. The union's rank and file were caught up in the anti-Communist fervor. That coupled with management's desire to break the union was its death knell.

By the sixties and seventies, Harvester was running into problems endemic to older established entities. They had had a long and beloved history of paying substantial dividends, but as their factories aged and other lines required investment, the capital was being paid out in dividends, making shareholders happy, but starving the company for capital reinvestment. So they had to rely on borrowing but thanks to the Vietnam War and other factors, interest rates were at an all time high (I remember them as high as 17% when I was thinking about buying a farm) and that kind of interest rate will make borrowing exorbitantly expensive. It was a vicious cycle, the sales force kept pushing weakly designed and ill-tested new equipment out the door, which then failed pushing market share lower making even less capital available especially with the profits all going out the door as dividends. 

Harvard Business School (you know the school that gave us the creators of derivatives and other high risk financial instruments) was invited to visit and review IH's attempts at rebound. "In a sense [they wrote] the problems at Harvester faces are the problems of American industry, and to that extent is prototypical of corporate American industry,...how to compete in a slow-growth, capital-intensive market when you're not the market leader." By this time John Deere, which had recognized much earlier recognized the need for higher horse power tractors, dominated the agricultural sector and had built highly automated factories. And, of course, the changes Archie McCardle, hired away from Xerox with a huge compensation package, wanted and needed to implement, met with resistance from those who had been with IH a long time. His strategy of giving employees targets beyond what they thought were acceptable and possible could be disconcerting and morale busting when they were unable to meet those targets. 

But lest this review get completely out of hand, I will just summarize and say it's a fascinating examination of the rise and fall of an iconic American company, the kind of representative history that has happened to many other companies: Sears, Montgomery Ward, K-Mart, etc., etc. and that will no doubt happen to many others when their founders leave the scene. I only wish the book could have been updated past its 1985 publication. IH was sold to Tennaco in 1985 which merged the IH tractor line with their Case line becoming Case/IH. Fortunately they adopted red as the new paint scheme rather than Case's desert sand colors as well as the Farmall designation. Excellent read.

*The Moline Model D was probably the first to offer multiple attachments on a tractor. For its time it was incredibly versatile and to my knowledge the first articulated design. See http://molineplowco.com/tractors/
 
**In John Deere's defense, the old two-cylinder had incredible fuel economy and lugging power. The 730, out in 1959, had accessories that beat the competition - like their seat, far and away the most comfortable.

Review: The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities, and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church by John Thavis

A very interesting, if uneven, look at the internal workings of the Vatican and its relationship to the Vatican press corps. I say uneven because the segments on the press corps are light, almost comical in several instances, and then he switches to much more serious topics as the way the Vatican mishandled the sexual abuse scandals and John Paul II's close relationship with Cardinal Marciel and the Legion, not to mention the personality of Pope Benedict. 

The book begins with some amusing stories from the enclave where they elected Cardinal Ratzinger as the Pope, following the death of John Paul II. Apparently there are numerous traditions that must be closely followed, but some of the modern trappings are just confused things. The bell-ringer who was supposed to ring the bell at the sight of the white smoke couldn't receive the news via radio because of the jamming devices installed by the Vatican to prevent Cardinals and others from using cell phones during the enclave. Moreover, the special stove they had installed in the Chapel with a special chemical to turn the smoke white couldn't be lit so you had a group of cardinals surrounding the stove trying to get it to light that resembled old men at a barbecue, as the Sistine Chapel filled with smoke -- don't tell the museum's curators of Michelangelo's painting. 

Secrecy at the Vatican rises to the level of fetish. Everything is hidden and probably the most important tenet is that no one must say anything negative about his (never a her) superior or say anything that might bring the church into disrepute. John Paul II had child-like naive love for anything that smacked of evangelical revivalism for the Catholic Church, which made him susceptible to the machinations of Cardinal Marcial, founder of the Legions of Christ and serial pedophile. Marcial and the Legionnaires would shower Rome's cardinals with expensive gifts worth up to $1000 not to mention millions in support of the Pope's travels. He was brought down, if you could say that, only following numerous charges from Legionnaires who described how if they felt guilty from Marcial's inflicted masturbatory sessions, he would absolve them on the spot and often claimed he had a special dispensation from Rome for his sexual proclivities. That became too much for Rome, not the sexual misconduct, the misuse of dispensations. In any case, he was never punished, only put out to pasture. (They admitted to his fathering several children and heterosexual affairs - after-all he was human- but they never admitted to the homosexual activities.) Marcial and the Legion never apologized, claiming only that Marcial would be Christ-like in his surrendering to the higher authority of the Pope. It's enough to make you puke.

Thavis devotes a chapter to the campaign by some of the church's reactionaries to have Pius XII (considered by some to be "Hitler's Pope") declared a saint. You might as well declare a Hershey Bar (seems like Catholics will pray to anything) a saint, setting the bar so low. I mean really; Aquinas, maybe, but Pius XII or John Paul II (considered by some to be Marcial's enabler)? Give me a fucking break.

Here's what Thavis has to say about it:
One of the traditional signs of sainthood, still very much taken into account by Vatican experts, is the existence of a “popular cult” –evidence that people pray to the person in the years following his or her death. The six-year-old Nennolina, for example, who was soon to be beatified [by Pope Benedict XVI] was this kind of grassroots saint. Her friends, neighbors and relatives kept the fame of her sanctity alive by publishing her letters, reporting her holiness widely and praying to the little Roman girl.

If the fact that Pius XII was a pope gave his sainthood cause some inherent advantages, in other ways it made perceptions of his holiness less immediate and less personal. He was for most Catholics a remote figure at the far end of the hierarchy. History would ultimately be his judge, and it always struck me that whatever “popular cult” he did have seemed to be centered in and around the Vatican. (p. 229-231)

As with any large organization, politics, secrecy and money reign supreme. Sometimes they also appear quite short-sighted. Desperate for a new parking lot inside the Vatican, the engineers maneuvered the Cardinals to authorize them to begin digging without allowing any archaeologists to check the site first for possible artifacts and things of historical interest. They claimed to have done some test bores, but were horrified when the bulldozers tore open a huge burial site with many hundreds of Roman tombs and full of mosaics and museum quality pieces. Had they had any sense, it seems to me, not to mention foresight, they never would have let the archaeologists in first (full disclaimer, I studied a bit of archaeology in college) and when the tombs had been found, turned it into a major tourist attraction, charging money to watch and then visit. They could have built the parking lot elsewhere and had buses (for a fee, of course) carrying people back and forth. They would have made much more money and kept everyone (except perhaps the asphalt engineers) very happy. Instead, despite their attempt at secrecy, the result was a huge scandal.

One of the most interesting sections described the attempt by the SSPX under the leadership of Marcel Lefebvre to influence Cardinal Ratzinger and the newly elected Pope. They were upset with the changes enacted by Pope John XXIII and wanted a return to the Latin mass and the more traditional (and medieval) form of worship. He belonged to  identifiable strand of right-wing political and religious opinion in French society that originated among the defeated royalists after the 1789 French Revolution. He defied Pope John Paul II and consecrated four bishops, an action for which he (and they) were excommunicated. He was particularly incensed by the Vatican's reaching out to other religious denominations, not believing in rapprochement. Apparently he and his followers didn't buy all that nonsense about the Pope being God's representative, Clearly, Lefebvre believed he had better communication with God than the Pope. The whole thing smacked of Luther's rebellion against the established order in 1521, his excommunication, and we all know where that led. Seems to me that Lefebvre met most of the conditions of heresy.

Thavis, a Vatican correspondent, and chief of the Rome Bureau for the Catholic News Service, for more than thirty years, says he wrote the book to reveal the inner workings of the Vatican, a place rife with political in-fighting and scandal, hardly the locus of a church with a unified and universal mission. Whether the institution will ever become governable in the modern world remains to be seen. Ratzinger (Benedict) gave up but it should not have come as a surprise. The man had spent his entire life seeking refuge from controversy and the world in general. He had decided at a very young age he wanted to be a cardinal, and enrolled in seminary at age 12, with but a brief stint in the German Army, his life was one of books (sounds delightful) and as an academic -- he never had a job as a pastor dealing with the day to day quotidian lives of parishioners -- fled conflict. I suspect the pressures of being Pope were just too much, so off to the monastery.

Some people will pay NOT to be prayed for....

This study is quite interesting. It seeks to determine the value of the phrase, "thoughts and prayers" following a tragedy. It attempted to place a value on the phrase economically, i.e. using the market.

"The Christians who participated in this study valued prayer from a stranger, on average, at more than $4. A prayer from a priest was worth about $7. The nonreligious participants would pay less than $2 for a priest to not pray for them, and over $3.50 to avoid a Christian stranger’s prayer.

“This article raises an interesting point — some people, maybe, just don’t want your thoughts or prayers,” said University of Colorado at Denver psychologist Kevin Masters, who was not a member of the research team. In 2006, Masters and his colleagues analyzed the body of research on the effects of prayer on someone’s behalf. No study was able to show that prayer has discernible health benefits on a distant recipient."

Study: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/10/1908268116

Article: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/16/some-people-would-pay-avoid-thoughts-prayers-after-disaster-study-finds/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

Review: LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

Every new technology is disruptive and many of those in the past bear an uncanny resemblance in their effects to those of today. Each has been heralded as providing the means for everlasting peace. Moveable type democratized book production making reading almost a required skill yet contributed to religious upheaval. The telegraph and then the telephone made communication virtually instantaneous and while they brought people closer together provided the means for generals to control their troops from afar. Radio gave FDR the means to go around the newspapers who had pushed back against his third and fourth terms. His fireside chats reduced his message to just short bursts of ten-minute talks (tweets of the day, if you will) while Goebbels noted that the rise of Nazism would never have been possible without radio. Television forced politicians to change their habits and locked in the public to news as entertainment. It ended the Vietnam War by bringing battle scenes into living rooms. The Internet, still in its infancy really, is equally disruptive by changing the way we link to one another.

Twitter, live streaming, and blogging have become essential parts of the distribution of information, both real and fake. Virtually everyone has a smart-phone which even radically alters the battlefield. The Russians used the geo-location transmissions of Ukrainian soldiers cellphones to zero in their artillery on those troops during that brief war.

Cyber warfare includes more than just hacking a network. It's possible to cause damage by hacking information as well. Singer and Brooking cite the seesaw battle for Mosul in Iraq as just one example. ISIS used Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook to manipulate likes and the streams to promote their own POV. By manipulating images, followers, and hash-tags they were successful in winning converts and battles. The U.S. and Iraqi armies were totally unprepared for this propaganda warfare, but they learned fast, and the #freemosul tag soon appeared countering the ISIS streams with those more favorable to U.S. actions. Just as Amazon has disrupted commerce, so had social media disrupted warfare and politics. 

Terrorists now show their work on-line. They use Twitter routinely. Russia tries to destabilize democracies by fomenting distrust of civil institutions with fake material. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battleground that plays out on our smart-phones. Singer and Brooking, using a combination of stories and research, lay out the problems facing us with new ways of conducting warfare. But it works both ways. Those Russian soldiers who shot down MH17 were identified through painstaking crowd sourcing work on-line by tracking soldier's emails, tire treads, registration numbers, all sorts of clues that were found on-line. Their work for the Dutch Investigation team was hacked by Russian hackers attempting to hide the Russian involvement. 

Propaganda can now go viral. Fake stories are re-tweeted by confederates whose followers often unwittingly re-tweet the false information and soon millions have received precisely the message intended by the original poster who may be a governmental entity seeking to destabilize an adversary. The audience is huge as is the volume. Around 3.4 billion people have access to the Internet -- about half the world's population. Roughly 500 million tweets are sent each day and nearly seven hours of footage is uploaded on YouTube every second in 76 languages.

"No matter how outlandish these theories sound, they served their purpose successfully. 'The disinformation campaign [around the flight] shows how initially successful propaganda can be. . . . Obviously the ...lies were eventually debunked, but by then their narrative had been fixed in many people's minds.' That is the overarching goal of information hackers: 'The more doubt you can sow in people's minds about all information, the more you will weaken their propensity to recognize the truth.'"

Trump was one of the first to recognize the power of Twitter. Following his massive bankruptcy and declining interest in the Apprentice TV show, Trump began to tweet thousands of messages, bombarding the twitter-sphere with provocative, false, and often incendiary tweets. Soon his financial peccadilloes were forgotten, obliterated by his Twitter-storm. His infamy rose, but he didn't care as he valued the attention more than anything. It's a lesson he has never forgotten. As Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, said, "it matters less that what you say is true, only that it be believed."

The recent video of Nancy Pelosi appearing to be drunk and the Trump's attempt to doctor the CNN video showing that Acosta had inappropriately touched a white House intern are just a couple examples of internal use of social media to influence popular thought.

Lifewire.com, a technology website based in New York, defines an Internet troll as a modern version of the same mythical character. They hide behind their computer screens and go out of their way to cause trouble on the Internet. Like its mythical predecessor, an Internet troll is both angry and disruptive - often for no real reason. The effects can be completely out of proportion to their size.
The question remains what should governments do, if anything, to shut down trolls. In some cases they are freedom fighters trying to rally against a corrupt government. Would it be better to simply keep the Internet as open as possible? Satire, parody, misleading content, impostor content, fabricated content and manipulated content all need to be seen separately from each other and dealt with accordingly. How is that to be accomplished? Who will control it?

The "Like" phenomenon is an important part of the campaign. The more "likes" a piece of news or comment gets on a news or social site, the more likely it is to be believed. People are more likely to believe a headline if they have seen a similar one before. “It didn't even matter if the story was preceded by a warning that it might be fake,” the authors write. “What counted most was familiarity. The more often you hear a claim, the less likely you are to assess it critically.” That's what irritates me about the media's obsession with Trump's Tweets. By repeating them incessantly and parsing them repeatedly, they are validated. That, to some extent, was the genius of the Russian interference in the last election. You don't need sophisticated hackers to implement it either, just a bunch of people promoting a certain meme or thought until it becomes a tsunami overwhelming any other rational discussion; it becomes "the truth." Slick videos, click bait, and viral mimes become the new weapons in undermining democracy effectively grounding billion dollar fighter jets which then become obsolete as the war has already been lost.

As an aside, I remember listening to a commentator who suggested that the Phil Donahue show started the descent into irrationality. He was the first to invite callers on the show live to express their opinion. Soon all the shows were doing it. Callers became the experts and soon everyone was his own expert bypassing the value of people who had actually studied an issue. A bit simplistic perhaps, but there may be a grain of truth there.

Fascinating book.
      

Review: Cult of the Dead Cow by Joseph Menn

​

Cult of the Dead Cow is the facetious name of an early group of hackers (white hat) that began as a computer bulletin board (BBS). Consisting originally of bored but talented teenagers who enjoyed reverse engineering phone systems and early computer software, they evolved into "hactivists" (hackers with a mission), many of whom went on the become influential and and important members of the establishment.

Menn follows the individual careers of cDc members who initially focused on security flaws in Windows. They were completely apolitical but then morphed into " human rights activists and internet freedom advocates, eventually becoming security advisers for powerful institutions.

​The hackers all started out delighting in discovering security holes in early Windows software but were dismayed by the reaction of the software giant when these holes were pointed out to them. The reaction was a large ho-hum. suggesting that and if you wanted to have a secure system, "go buy Windows NT. That's an irony since no one "buys" software, you buy a license which immunizes the software developer from accountability and permits them to see access to a product that's defective.

Their dismay is illustrated by this anecdote. The cDc had created a program that revealed the flaws in Windows but it was also a tool that could be used for less than savory purposes. They released it free to everyone as open source so others could revise and manipulate it. The establishment wasn't sure what to make of it. The FBI, while trying to discourage its release decided it didn't violate any existing laws. The anti-virus business was not pleased as it also showed how weak their software was, but many security professionals decided it was a necessary evil if for no other reason than to force Microsoft to fix their security holes. “Microsoft is evil because they sell crap.” One of the cDc members took a copy of the program on a CD to a Microsoft higher-up. He said thanks and was about to insert it into his CD-ROM drive when she, horror-stricken, asked if his computer was networked. It was. She then asked if it was sand-boxed (programs loaded were quarantined until proven safe.) No, was the response, to which she, shocked, pointed out to him that he was just about to load a program from someone he didn't know, a self-identified hacker, into a computer that was not sand-boxed and connected to his entire network and therefore completely vulnerable. That was their state of mind.

Eventually, major businesses realized how important these hackers were and many moved on to become security professionals. As their prominence grew so did the counterculture environment of the early movement begin to fade and they became more political especially after the Chinese student movement was squashed. They began to create software intended for use by dissidents and other cultural reformers, anyone anti-authoritarian.

Under Obama, through Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the hacktivism championed by Brown and the cDc to help with dissident subversion of foreign governments would become American foreign policy, part of a program informally known as “internet in a box.” While generally laudatory, Menn doesn't like all of them. Julian Assange and Jake Applebaum of Wikileaks and the TOR project are not portrayed sympathetically, "draping themselves in morality while serving other causes.” Assange was known for his sexual straying and his current behavior certainly distracts from the more positive aspects of Wikileaks.

Menn is also not afraid to criticism the industry proposing that cybersecurity problems today are at least partly the result of terrible business and engineering decisions made decades ago. These decisions caused problems that still exist. Whether the movement of the hacktivists into the world of corporate and individual greed will be able to remedy some of those structural problems without becoming part of the problem themselves remains to be seen.

​To some extent it's the old story: countercultural anti-authoritarian types find success and join the corporate elites. How many Vietnam's most vocal protesters went on to become a prominent part of the culture they had so despised? Beto O'Rourke, one of the early cDc members is now running for President and another is security chief for Facebook! How well did that go...

Great read.

Time for a new deity?

Isn't it funny how many people fall back on the "thoughts and prayers" mantra after a tragedy. You'd think they would have learned by now that it's a meaningless gesture. Unless they are praying for more senseless violence, the prayers are definitely not working. Or, perhaps their God isn't listening, could care less, is evil, or isn't there. Perhaps it's time to switch gods. I understand Zeus and Apollo are soliciting new worshippers and they have a better track record.

https://safearound.com/Americas/United-States-of-America/

Given the catastrophic number of mass shootings in this country, one might not be too surprised if other countries might consider us a risky place to visit. Good thing we are ranked 51st out of 162 in safety and 114th in crime rate (out of 218).

I'm reassured for sure. Yikes.

Standing with the 2nd Amendment

I really don't understand those who want to suppress my right to have a weapon holding 200+ bullets. When going after a rabbit or squirrel it's terribly important to pre-masticate and tenderize the sucker and a volley of 50+ bullets is the only way. And look you shoot a deer with one bullet it might charge you and being a nervous nut, I need to stop that sucker in his tracks by turning it into a strainer.

Review: Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know by P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman

Singer and Friedman argue that cyber knowledge needs to be a requirement in schools. All the kids are now in cyberspace yet there is little formal education about the insecurity of simple passwords, the importance of OS updates, and problems inherent in social networking as a mechanism to reveal personal information. Most common password="password" and the 2nd most common is "123456". Common words are easily hack-able. One high level executive told his IT people he only wanted a one letter password, that he was too busy to be bothered to type in a long one. By the end of the day he had labelled himself to everyone in the corporation as a really stupid person and one who didn't care about security.

With complexity comes vulnerability. BMW had designed a high tech car and when authorities in Paris couldn't figure out why only a certain new model of BMW was being stolen they reviewed CCTV cameras and discovered how the thieves could hack into the car's software, unlock the doors, reprogram a blank key and just drive off, all in the pace of five minutes. Terrorists use social networking to get their word out and often with the unwilling connivance of the West. One terrorist cell was using a web hosting company located in Texas to promote their campaign. The hosting company had sixteen million web pages, had not seen the offending pages, and did nothing until someone happened to point out to them what they were doing.

Humans are often the weak link in the chain. In a famous "candy drop" attack, malevolent actors left flash drives around a military base. Sure enough, a soldier picked one up and inserted it in his machine to see what was on it. It took the Army 14 months to clean up the damage to all its machines. People will often just give out their passwords to official sounding individuals who may or may not be really who they say they are. In another example, some soldiers in Iraq took pictures inside their helicopters and posted them to a picture website. There was nothing classified in the pictures but each picture contained locational information in the meta-data and terrorist were able to destroy the helicopters in a mortar attack by knowing their exact location. Emails, pictures, virtually everything that moves on the Internet has meta-data attached to it and just a routine search of social sites can reveal all sorts of information about people they would rather not have known

Just defining what is or is not an attack can be problematic. The authors identify several types. What the response should be may depend on the severity or the result. Often even experts can't agree on what constitutes an attack. How about denial of service attacks. If it simply interferes with gamers ability to finish a game it's not as serious as preventing banks from interacting with their customers or delivering a utility. Is stealing someone's identity in a confidentiality attack just as serious as stealing the plans of a new fighter jet? In one war game sponsored by the U.S. the opposition team changed the shipping labels on shipments intended for troops and they received toilet paper instead of ammunition and MREs.

NSA surveillance practices have caused tension throughout the world. In one instance, the Dutch, were about to refuse any access to cloud services in the Netherlands to U.S. companies. Some foreign countries have now begun to institutionalize the Internet as a basic human right. Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, see internet freedom as a threat to their governments. Censorship is seen as a tool for stability. In Thailand it's against the law to defame the monarch; in Britain it's a hobby. Cultural differences abound. Internet governance is still up for grabs.

A really interesting book, aimed at the informed layperson. The problem with books of such currency is that they really lack timelessness because of the speed with which the technology changes so the reader has to assume the possibilities have advanced far beyond what the author has explained.

Review: Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

I'm a Connelly fan, but this one (admittedly I have not read the first Ballard) I just had trouble getting a grip on. I know that authors probably have difficulty keeping a series with one character alive, but Connelly, was very successful with his Lincoln Lawyer series which integrated another character with Harry Bosch much better. I listened to this as an audio-book and Titus Welliver did his usual remarkable job narrating Bosch. Christine Lakin did a fine job with Ballard, it's just the story didn't gel for me.

Review: Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry

Thomas Perry can be relied upon to deliver solid mysteries. Although often billed as thrillers, to me they don't fit the description well as the outcome is usually reliably certain. This one was intriguing as it contains two sets, maybe even three, of protagonists. (I began to feel a certain sympathy for the thieves who, after all, were just trying to retire.) One set is the team of ex-cops now searching for the killer of a man who was more (or less, depending on your POV) than appearances. The other set is a pair of assassins who have been hired to kill the first team. It all comes together in a glorious denouement, although frankly the violence and over-specificity of brand-name weapons does nothing for me. Perry's originality and character development, on the other hand, do. Good read.

Review: The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age by Adam Segal

As I write this John Bolton and Trump seem to be planning a major war with Iran. They are not paying attention to the incredible damage that can be done by state-sponsored or even independent actors to infrastructure by cyber-attacks. Iran caused millions in damage to Saudi oilfield computers; Russia virtually shut down Estonia for more than a week to punish them for their support of Ukraine; the U.S. and Israel wrecked havoc on Iranian centrifuges with a cleverly designed malicious worm; Iran caused millions in damages to Sheldon Adelson's empire after he made injudicious remarks regarding nuclear war and Iran; the list goes on and on. 

The web is used to wage war and spy on, coerce, and damage other countries. Israel and the U.S. is want to derail the Iranian nuclear weapons program. India wants to prevent Pakistani terrorists from using smartphones to coordinate attacks. Brazil has plans to lay new fiber cables and develop satellite links so its Internet traffic no longer has to pass through Miami. China does not want to be dependent on the West for its technology needs. These new digital conflicts pose no physical threat—no one has ever died from a cyber-attack—but they serve to both threaten and defend the integrity of complex systems like power grids, financial institutions, and security networks.

What makes these attacks so problematic is that they can be designed to hide the source and can be initiated from virtually anywhere. The U.S. is so dependent on the Internet that even the slightest upheaval in some router farm could make bank deposits unavailable, the electrical grid unreliable, just to mention a few potential problems. State-backed hacking initiatives can shut down, sabotage trade strategies, steal intellectual property, sow economic chaos, and paralyze whole countries.

Segal insists that MAD (mutually assured destruction - the bedrock of nuclear war prevention) applies here as well, i.e., that countries would be afraid of massive retaliation were they to engage in widespread harm to another country. Insidious targeted attacks could be more useful and determining where they are coming from is often a laborious and time-consuming process.

Hacking tools themselves can come back to haunt their creators. "Cyber-security firm Symantec discovered that Chinese hacking group, APT 3 acquired National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools used against them in 2016 to target U.S. allies. APT 3 is responsible for various attacks on the United States and has been tracked by the NSA for over a decade. Symantec does not believe the group stole the U.S. code, but rather acquired it from an NSA attack on its computers. APT 3 then used the hacking tools in cyber-attacks involving five countries in Europe and Asia. This is not the first time U.S. agencies’ cyber weapons have fallen into the wrong hands." (from Adam Segal's blog, May 10, 2019) Those hacking tools remain viable almost indefinitely and are impossible to eradicate

The issues raised by Segal are mind-boggling. The cyber-attack by the North Koreans for example were supposedly in retaliation for SONY's production of a sophomoric comedy ridiculing the North Korean leader. 200 TB of emails and information were retrieved and then used as blackmail to force SONY to not release the movie. What role should states play in such an attack. For that matter what state did SONY belong too? They are a multi-national corporation. What nation should be responsible for its defense?

The attack on Estonia by the Russians in 2007 raises additional issues. Russia (or its non-state actors) complained about the removal of a statue in Tallinn. Estonia refused to back down and soon a huge denial of service attack began that virtually shut down the country for about three weeks. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world having decided following the fall of the Soviet Union that it would be the most effective and economical way to build infrastructure in the new country. They had a strong cadre of programmers and IT people. Access to the Internet is considered a basic human right there. Western and Estonian analysts were confident the attacks came from a Russian source but were they state coordinated or simply vandals. And since Estonia was a member of NATO, what was NATO's responsibility in helping t defend against an attack on Estonian infrastructure? Ultimately, several western countries helped in thwarting and reducing the effects of the attacks and the resulting permanent damage was minimal, but for a while the country was at a virtual standstill. The Estonian response has been to develop a large volunteer (larger than their army) group of IT specialists who help to defend their cyber infrastructure.

In the DDOS attacks on Georgia, the Russians claimed these were independent folks just wanting to express their opinions. So the freedom to launch cyber-attacks has now morphed into freedom of expression.The situation there was different, everyone having learned from Estonia and Georgian traffic was routed through the U.S. with help from Poland and Estonia. Whether that made the U.S. complicit in the conflict or not was problematic.

Hacking of social media has become extremely sophisticated and the U.S. is woefully behind except as used by a certain U.S politician who dominates the Twitter world. The technique is to drown out the opposition. China used massive troll tweets and bots to overwhelm any discussion of opposition to their regime in Tibet. The Russians spread disinformation, anything to provoke and incite assorted groups. The idea is to confuse and promote their POV to the exclusion of others while preventing any kind of rational or reasonable debate on any issue. Doctored photos are spread about the opposition and soon it becomes impossible to separate reality from the simulated.

Ultimately Segal is optimistic, forecasting that if not pacific, the world will at least have come to terms with cyberspace and information will flow freer and be less dangerous. I remain more skeptical. 

Review: Alger Hiss and the Battle for History by Susan Jacoby

Does anyone under the age of seventy really care any more about Alger Hiss? Even Susan Jacoby's mother asked, "Who the hell cares about that anymore?" Jacoby's goal was to show how the arguments and debates over Hiss's guilt continue to play out in our politics in different forms. What we see today is simply a continuation of the besmirchment of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt by the Right and an attempt to defend them by the Left. That was precisely the symbolism behind the Alger Hiss case. The Left was attempting to defend the New Deal and obfuscate its flirtation with Communism in the thirties, while the Right was attacking the New Deal and hiding its own flirtation with Naziism and isolationism of the twenties and thirties by labeling FDR's attempt to save capitalism as communistic.

She decided to write the book after watching a pathetic spectacle. At a conference on Hiss in 2007, she watched his stepson, who was in his nineties, valiantly trying to deny that his step-father had ever met Chambers because he, a little boy at the time, never saw him in the house. The idea that an eight-year-old could remember who was in the house at a particular time was emblematic of the irrationality of the Left; but the Right had its own irrationality.

Jacoby, herself is absolutely convinced Hiss lied -- she cites Weinstein's Perjury as providing conclusive proof, but she's only 98% convinced Hiss was a spy. If he was for certain, his spy skills were childish. And there were really competent spies like George Koval who had been trained by the GRU and even worked on the Manhattan Project. But Hiss and his eastern establishment elitism had become symbolic of the New Deal which was under attack by the Right. Richard Nixon had hated Hiss and his background from the first day they met. Hiss had remarked how he had gone to Harvard and Nixon had gone to what was it? Whittier College? So even though Chambers was clearly a disreputable liar and Hiss a charming aristocrat, -- or perhaps because of that -- Nixon and HUAC had it in for him.

But her book is not really about the case but about the media and how it wrote about the case over the years.

In another of those wonderful ironies, after Hiss got out of prison, he got a job selling stationery. Salesmanship is sort of the iconic American profession where those who are the most successful are those who are best at telling people what they want to hear.

I listened also to an interview Jacoby had with Brian Lamb. He asked her about her time in Moscow where she had been a correspondent for the Washington Post while protests were going on in the United States about the Vietnam War. 

But where I really became opposed to the Vietnam War was in Moscow. l lived in Moscow from 1969 to the end of 1971. I wrote my first two books on Russia when I came home from the material I gathered there. And I was there on the day that the shootings at Kent State University, which you know the famous iconic picture of the young girl over the fallen student there shot by the National Guard. It was of course on the front page of Izvestia ire Pravda that day. 

And l had many Russian dissident friends who had an almost highly idealized view of the United States because the Soviet Union was so bad; the United States must be good. And the time l had, the question they asked was how you know when the thing we looked to for your country is that you allowed dissent. You don't kill dissenters. You don't put them in concentration camps. How do you reconcile that, my Russian dissident friends said, with this picture from Kent State? 

First of all, they said - because they're so used to, they were so used to doctored pictures - is this real? And I said, yes, It real you know I've seen it on the wire. But at this point I began to think what kind of a damage to our reputation, our best ideals, the best things that people around the world think America stands for, this is yet another thing. And I think that's when I decisively turned against the Vietnam War, when I found it impossible to explain to Russians who had idealized America, how can we be shooting people for demonstrating against the Vietnam War? 

How sad.

As to the lessons from Alger Hiss and Vietnam:

But l think that what happened in the .60s, even more than the Vietnam War obviously. Obviously you know two things happened in oOs of surpassing importance, the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protest, followed quite swiftly by the Women's Movement. All of these things had to do with saying, well just because you're the government or just because you're the authorities, you don't know best.

And I think that -1 think unfortunately the Vietnam War has not had nearly as much of an impact as l would have thought it would have had because of the kind of historical amnesia that has characterized our country over the last four decades. And that begins a little bit in the 60's where the culture of celebrity begins to come in and people are getting all of their news from visual images which in one way is what turned people against the war. But I think of the late 60s as a time when begin the process of losing our attention span.

So I think in one way, I don't think if the lessons of the Vietnam War were learned, 1 don't think that Bush would have had so much overwhelming support early on for the Iraq War. So I'm not sure what a long-term effect the Vietnam War had on this country. 

SCOTUS, Citizenship and the Census

An interesting question has arisen as to whether the SCOTUS has jurisdiction to rule on the census form issue. Congress is given the responsibility for the Census in the Constitution. In 1902 it created the Census Bureau that was placed under the Commerce Department in 1903. Since the Commerce Department resides in the Executive Branch, it has been argued that as a function of the Executive Branch, it is solely within the purview of the President to decide what information is to be collected. Others would argue that since the responsibility of Congress which then delegated that power, any conflict between the two would have to be decided by the third branch, SCOTUS. Ironically, in that 5-4 decision the court ruled that the Executive had the power to decide the content but it had to have valid reasons for doing so. Decisions needed “genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” Roberts wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.” A larger issue is whether the courts can force the president to adhere to the procedures outlined in the Administrative Procedures Act. Then again, the Constitution gives Congress the power to decide on the jurisdiction of SCOTUS. (See Article III. Just how that power is applied or defined has been argued many times.)

Roberts had made it clear in the first part of his decision that the Commerce Secretary had the power to determine the content of the questionnaire, where the four justices in the minority disagreed was in his questioning of the motives of the decision. “For the first time ever, the Court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale,” Thomas wrote. “Echoing the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse, the court declares the secretary’s memorandum ‘pretextual.’ ”

Alito argued the jurisdiction point of view, “To put the point bluntly, the Federal Judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question [of] whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons,” he wrote, arguing for Chevron Deference (although I doubt he would see it that way) (“Chevron deference, or Chevron doctrine, is an administrative law principle that compels federal courts to defer to a federal agency's interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute that Congress delegated to the agency to administer.”) The liberals on the Court argued adding the question would result in less accuracy. So Roberts’ reasoning was unique.

The question itself would seem to be uncontroversial. It was on most census forms (sometimes only on the long one, other times on the short form) until 2010 when Obama removed the long form thus eliminating the question.

I guess I'm puzzled by all the fuss which I believe to be based on false assumptions. The citizenship question used to be on the census questionnaire. Wouldn't it be useful to know how many non-citizens there are? They deserve representation but non-citizens, be they immigrants or otherwise, can't vote anyway, so how would non-citizens affect the outcome of any federal election? I doubt if there is any evidence showing that adding it to the questionnaire as a way of increasing Republicans is correct, although the under-countof perhaps 8 million -- if the Census Bureau is correct -- *might* (I emphasize, might) result in less population for traditionally Democratic areas. If everyone is counted in a district it would possibly change district boundaries, but how does that necessarily translate into benefiting either party? Conversely, I doubt the charge that "immigrants" (the issue should be citizen v non-citizen, not immigrant) would be reluctant to indicate whether they are, or are not citizens, would affect their completion of the form which is required under federal law. Legal immigrants who are non-citizens would have no reason to not complete the form.

Fact is there are millions of immigrants who are legal residents, and have every right to be here, but who, for whatever reason, have not chosen to become citizens. The purpose of the census is to count the number of people in the U.S. for the purposes of apportionment. (“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”) Personally, I think it would be very useful to know how many are citizens, how many are legal residents, and how many are undocumented aliens (who may have children who are citizens.) Both parties are taking ideological positions that may be based on false assumptions, i.e. that the presence or absence of the citizenship question will benefit or hinder them. I don’t think the answer is that clear. To fall back on what the Constitution says, however, it’s critical that *everyone* be counted no matter their status. That’s what it says. That said, it seems to me the Constitution says plainly that apportionment is to be based on a count of ALL people (except non-taxed Indians, of course). The Census Bureau should be doing everything in its power to make an accurate count. I note that the concept of citizenship didn’t even appear in the Constitution until the 14th Amendment when it was added to make sure that freed slaves were to be accorded the full rights of citizenship, those “Privileges or Immunities.”. (Not women, though.)

Apollo 11, Reason, and Technology

This was written some time ago and contains, I think, one of the best descriptions of the Apollo 11 mission. Read it and then see if you can divine the author. It may surprise you. Note your answer in the comments on the blog, please.

“No matter what discomforts and expenses you had to bear to come here,” said a NASA guide to a group of guests, at the conclusion of a tour of the Space Center on Cape Kennedy, on July 15, 1969, “there will be seven minutes tomorrow morning that will make you feel it was worth it.”

The tour had been arranged for the guests invited by NASA to attend the launching of Apollo 11. As far as I was able to find out, the guests — apart from government officials and foreign dignitaries — were mainly scientists, industrialists, and a few intellectuals who had been selected to represent the American people and culture on this occasion. If this was the standard of selection, I am happy and proud that I was one of these guests.

The NASA tour guide was a slight, stocky, middle-aged man who wore glasses and spoke — through a microphone, at the front of the bus — in the mild, gentle, patient manner of a schoolteacher. He reminded me of television’s Mr. Peepers — until he took off his glasses and I took a closer look at his face: he had unusual, intensely intelligent eyes.

The Space Center is an enormous place that looks like an untouched wilderness cut, incongruously, by a net of clean, new, paved roads: stretches of wild, subtropical growth, an eagle’s nest in a dead tree, an alligator in a stagnant moat — and, scattered at random, in the distance, a few vertical shafts rising from the jungle, slender structures of a shape peculiar to the technology of space, which do not belong to the age of the jungle or even fully to ours.

The discomfort was an inhuman, brain-melting heat. The sky was a sunless spread of glaring white, and the physical objects seemed to glare so that the mere sensation of sight became an effort. We kept plunging into an oven, when the bus stopped and we ran to modern, air-conditioned buildings that looked quietly unobtrusive and militarily efficient, then plunging back into the air-conditioned bus as into a pool. Our guide kept talking and explaining, patiently, courteously, conscientiously, but his heart was not in it, and neither was ours, even though the things he showed us would have been fascinating at any other time. The reason was not the heat; it was as if nothing could register on us, as if we were out of focus, or, rather, focused too intently and irresistibly on the event of the following day.

It was the guide who identified it, when he announced: “And now we’ll show you what you really want to see” — and we were driven to the site of Apollo 11.

The “VIP’s” tumbled out of the bus like tourists and rushed to photograph one another, with the giant rocket a few hundred yards away in the background. But some just stood and looked.

I felt a kind of awe, but it was a purely theoretical awe; I had to remind myself: “This is it,” in order to experience any emotion. Visually it was just another rocket, the kind you can see in any science-fiction movie or on any toy counter: a tall, slender shape of dead, powdery white against the white glare of the sky and the steel lacing of the service tower. There were sharp black lines encircling the white body at intervals — and our guide explained matter-of-factly that these marked the stages that would be burned off in tomorrow’s firings. This made the meaning of the rocket more real for an instant. But the fact that the lunar module, as he told us, was already installed inside the small, slanted part way on top of the rocket, just under the still smaller, barely visible spacecraft itself, would not become fully real; it seemed too small, too far away from us, and, simultaneously, too close: I could not quite integrate it with the parched stubble of grass under our feet, with its wholesomely usual touches of litter, with the psychedelic colors of the shirts on the tourists snapping pictures.

Tomorrow, our guide explained, we would be sitting on bleachers three miles away; he warned us that the sound of the blast would reach us some seconds later than the sight, and assured us that it would be loud, but not unbearable.

I do not know that guide’s actual work at the Space Center, and I do not know by what imperceptible signs he gave me the impression that he was a man in love with his work. It was only that concluding remark of his, later, at the end of the tour, that confirmed my impression. In a certain way, he set, for me, the tone of the entire occasion: the sense of what lay under the surface of the seemingly commonplace activities.

My husband and I were staying in Titusville, a tiny frontier settlement — the frontier of science — built and inhabited predominantly by the Space Center’s employees. It was just like any small town, perhaps a little newer and cleaner — except that ten miles away, across the bluish spread of the Indian River, one could see the foggy, bluish, rectangular shape of the Space Center’s largest structure, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and, a little farther away, two faint vertical shafts: Apollo 11 and its service tower. No matter what one looked at in that town, one could not really see anything else.

I noticed only that Titusville had many churches, too many, and that they had incredible, modernistic forms. Architecturally, they reminded me of the more extreme types of Hollywood drive-ins: a huge, cone-shaped roof, with practically no walls to support it — or an erratic conglomeration of triangles, like a coral bush gone wild — or a fairy-tale candy-house, with S-shaped windows dripping at random like gobs of frosting. I may be mistaken about this, but I had the impression that here, on the doorstep of the future, religion felt out of place and this was the way it was trying to be modern.

Since all the motels of Titusville were crowded beyond capacity, we had rented a room in a private home: as their contribution to the great event, many of the local homeowners had volunteered to help their chamber of commerce with the unprecedented flood of visitors. Our room was in the home of an engineer employed at the Space Center. It was a nice, gracious family, and one might have said a typical small-town family, except for one thing: a quality of cheerful openness, directness, almost innocence — the benevolent, unself-consciously self-confident quality of those who live in the clean, strict, reality-oriented atmosphere of science.

On the morning of July 16, we got up at 3 a.m. in order to reach the NASA Guest Center by 6 a.m., a distance that a car traveled normally in ten minutes. (Special buses were to pick up the guests at that Center, for the trip to the launching.) But Titusville was being engulfed by such a flood of cars that even the police traffic department could not predict whether one would be able to move through the streets that morning. We reached the Guest Center long before sunrise, thanks to the courtesy of our hostess, who drove us there through twisting back streets.

On the shore of the Indian River, we saw cars, trucks, trailers filling every foot of space on both sides of the drive, in the vacant lots, on the lawns, on the river’s sloping embankment. There were tents perched at the edge of the water; there were men and children sleeping on the roofs of station wagons, in the twisted positions of exhaustion; I saw a half-naked man asleep in a hammock strung between a car and a tree. These people had come from all over the country to watch the launching across the river, miles away. (We heard later that the same patient, cheerful human flood had spread through all the small communities around Cape Kennedy that night, and that it numbered one million persons.) I could not understand why these people would have such an intense desire to witness just a few brief moments; some hours later, I understood it.

It was still dark as we drove along the river. The sky and the water were a solid spread of dark blue that seemed soft, cold, and empty. But, framed by the motionless black leaves of the trees on the embankment, two things marked off the identity of the sky and the earth: far above in the sky, there was a single, large star; and on earth, far across the river, two enormous sheaves of white light stood shooting motionlessly into the empty darkness from two tiny upright shafts of crystal that looked like glowing icicles; they were Apollo 11 and its service tower.

It was dark when a caravan of buses set out at 7 A.M. on the journey to the Space Center. The light came slowly, beyond the steam-veiled windows, as we moved laboriously through back streets and back roads. No one asked any questions; there was a kind of tense solemnity about that journey, as if we were caught in the backwash of the enormous discipline of an enormous purpose and were now carried along on the power of an invisible authority.

It was full daylight — a broiling, dusty, hazy daylight — when we stepped out of the buses. The launch site looked big and empty like a desert; the bleachers, made of crude, dried planks, seemed small, precariously fragile and irrelevant, like a hasty footnote. Three miles away, the shaft of Apollo 11 looked a dusty white again, like a tired cigarette planted upright.

The worst part of the trip was that last hour and a quarter, which we spent sitting on wooden planks in the sun. There was a crowd of seven thousand people filling the stands, there was the cool, clear, courteous voice of a loudspeaker rasping into sound every few minutes, keeping us informed of the progress of the countdown (and announcing, somewhat dutifully, the arrival of some prominent government personage, which did not seem worth the effort of turning one’s head to see), but all of it seemed unreal. The full reality was only the vast empty space, above and below, and the tired white cigarette in the distance.

The sun was rolling up and straight at our faces, like a white ball wrapped in dirty cotton. But beyond the haze, the sky was clear — which meant that we would be able to see the whole of the launching, including the firing of the second and third stages.

Let me warn you that television does not give any idea of what we saw. Later, I saw that launching again on color television, and it did not resemble the original.

The loudspeaker began counting the minutes when there were only five left. When I heard: “Three-quarters of a minute,” I was up, standing on the wooden bench, and do not remember hearing the rest.

It began with a large patch of bright, yellow-orange flame shooting sideways from under the base of the rocket. It looked like a normal kind of flame and I felt an instant’s shock of anxiety, as if this were a building on fire. In the next instant the flame and the rocket were hidden by such a sweep of dark red fire that the anxiety vanished: this was not part of any normal experience and could not be integrated with anything. The dark red fire parted into two gigantic wings, as if a hydrant were shooting streams of fire outward and up, toward the zenith — and between the two wings, against a pitch-black sky, the rocket rose slowly, so slowly that it seemed to hang still in the air, a pale cylinder with a blinding oval of white light at the bottom, like an upturned candle with its flame directed at the earth. Then I became aware that this was happening in total silence, because I heard the cries of birds winging frantically away from the flames. The rocket was rising faster, slanting a little, its tense white flame leaving a long, thin spiral of bluish smoke behind it. It had risen into the open blue sky, and the dark red fire had turned into enormous billows of brown smoke, when the sound reached us: it was a long, violent crack, not a rolling sound, but specifically a cracking, grinding sound, as if space were breaking apart, but it seemed irrelevant and unimportant, because it was a sound from the past and the rocket was long since speeding safely out of its reach — though it was strange to realize that only a few seconds had passed. I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph, but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe. The rocket was almost above our heads when a sudden flare of yellow-gold fire seemed to envelop it — I felt a stab of anxiety, the thought that something had gone wrong, then heard a burst of applause and realized that this was the firing of the second stage. When the loud, space-cracking sound reached us, the fire had turned into a small puff of white vapor floating away. At the firing of the third stage, the rocket was barely visible; it seemed to be shrinking and descending; there was a brief spark, a white puff of vapor, a distant crack — and when the white puff dissolved, the rocket was gone.

These were the seven minutes.

What did one feel afterward? An abnormal, tense overconcentration on the commonplace necessities of the immediate moment, such as stumbling over patches of rough gravel, running to find the appropriate guest bus. One had to overconcentrate, because one knew that one did not give a damn about anything, because one had no mind and no motivation left for any immediate action. How do you descend from a state of pure exaltation?

What we had seen, in naked essentials — but in reality, not in a work of art — was the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness.

The meaning of the sight lay in the fact that when those dark red wings of fire flared open, one knew that one was not looking at a normal occurrence, but at a cataclysm which, if unleashed by nature, would have wiped man out of existence — and one knew also that this cataclysm was planned, unleashed, and controlled by man, that this unimaginable power was ruled by his power and, obediently serving his purpose, was making way for a slender, rising craft. One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, or of chance, or of luck, that it was unmistakably human — with “human,’’ for once, meaning grandeur — that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding! For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw it had to feel — not “How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!” — but “How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!”

That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt — this was the cause of the event’s attraction and of the stunned, numbed state in which it left us. And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being — an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality. How many people would connect these two facts, I do not know.

The next four days were a period torn out of the world’s usual context, like a breathing spell with a sweep of clean air piercing mankind’s lethargic suffocation. For thirty years or longer, the newspapers had featured nothing but disasters, catastrophes, betrayals, the shrinking stature of men, the sordid mess of a collapsing civilization; their voice had become a long, sustained whine, the megaphone of failure, like the sound of an oriental bazaar where leprous beggars, of spirit or matter, compete for attention by displaying their sores. Now, for once, the newspapers were announcing a human achievement, were reporting on a human triumph, were reminding us that man still exists and functions as man.

Those four days conveyed the sense that we were watching a magnificent work of art — a play dramatizing a single theme: the efficacy of man’s mind. One after another, the crucial, dangerous maneuvers of Apollo 11’s flight were carried out according to plan, with what appeared to be an effortless perfection. They reached us in the form of brief, rasping sounds relayed from space to Houston and from Houston to our television screens, sounds interspersed with computerized figures, translated for us by commentators who, for once, by contagion, lost their usual manner of snide equivocation and spoke with compelling clarity.

The most confirmed evader in the worldwide audience could not escape the fact that these sounds announced events taking place far beyond the earth’s atmosphere — that while he moaned about his loneliness and “alienation” and fear of entering an unknown cocktail party, three men were floating in a fragile capsule in the unknown darkness and loneliness of space, with earth and moon suspended like little tennis balls behind and ahead of them, and with their lives suspended on the microscopic threads connecting numbers on their computer panels in consequence of the invisible connections made well in advance by man’s brain — that the more effortless their performance appeared, the more it proclaimed the magnitude of the effort expended to project it and achieve it — that no feelings, wishes, urges, instincts, or lucky “conditioning,” either in these three men or in all those behind them, from highest thinker to lowliest laborer who touched a bolt of that spacecraft, could have achieved this incomparable feat — that we were watching the embodied concretization of a single faculty of man: his rationality.

There was an aura of triumph about the entire mission of Apollo 11, from the perfect launch to the climax. An assurance of success was growing in the wake of the rocket through the four days of its moon-bound flight. No, not because success was guaranteed — it is never guaranteed to man — but because a progression of evidence was displaying the precondition of success: these men know what they are doing.

No event in contemporary history was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when, superimposed over the image of a garishly colored imitation-module standing motionless on the television screen, there flashed the words: “Lunar module has landed” — the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual module came shivering from the moon to the screen — and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step. At this last, I felt one instant of unhappy fear, wondering what he would say, because he had it in his power to destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 had done in their time. He did not. He made no reference to God; he did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of its opposite; he spoke of man. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” So it was.

As to my personal reaction to the entire mission of Apollo 11, I can express it best by paraphrasing a passage from Atlas Shrugged that kept coming back to my mind: “Why did I feel that joyous sense of confidence while watching the mission? In all of its giant course, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the mission was an embodied answer to ‘Why?’ and ‘What for?’ — like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind I worship. The mission was a moral code enacted in space.”

Now, coming back to earth (as it is at present), I want to answer briefly some questions that will arise in this context. Is it proper for the government to engage in space projects? No, it is not — except insofar as space projects involve military aspects, in which case, and to that extent, it is not merely proper but mandatory. Scientific research as such, however, is not the proper province of the government.

But this is a political issue; it pertains to the money behind the lunar mission or to the method of obtaining that money, and to the project’s administration; it does not affect the nature of the mission as such, it does not alter the fact that this was a superlative technological achievement.

In judging the effectiveness of the various elements involved in any large-scale undertaking of a mixed economy, one must be guided by the question: which elements were the result of coercion and which the result of freedom? It is not coercion, not the physical force or threat of a gun, that created Apollo 11. The scientists, the technologists, the engineers, the astronauts were free men acting of their own choice. The various parts of the spacecraft were produced by private industrial concerns. Of all human activities, science is the field least amenable to force: the facts of reality do not take orders. (This is one of the reasons why science perishes under dictatorships, though technology may survive for a short while.)

It is said that without the “unlimited” resources of the government, such an enormous project would not have been undertaken. No, it would not have been — at this time . But it would have been, when the economy was ready for it. There is a precedent for this situation. The first transcontinental railroad of the United States was built by order of the government, on government subsidies. It was hailed as a great achievement (which, in some respects, it was). But it caused economic dislocations and political evils, for the consequences of which we are paying to this day in many forms.

If the government deserves any credit for the space program, it is only to the extent that it did not act as a government, i.e., did not use coercion in regard to its participants (which it used in regard to its backers, i.e., the taxpayers). And what is relevant in this context (but is not to be taken as a justification or endorsement of a mixed economy) is the fact that of all our government programs, the space program is the cleanest and best: it, at least, has brought the American citizens a return on their forced investment, it has worked for its money, it has earned its keep, which cannot be said about any other program of the government.

There is, however, a shameful element in the ideological motivation (or the publicly alleged motivation) that gave birth to our space program: John F. Kennedy’s notion of a space competition between the United States and Soviet Russia.

A competition presupposes some basic principles held in common by all the competitors, such as the rules of the game in athletics, or the functions of the free market in business. The notion of a competition between the United States and Soviet Russia in any field whatsoever is obscene: they are incommensurable entities, intellectually and morally. What would you think of a competition between a doctor and a murderer to determine who could affect the greatest number of people? Or: a competition between Thomas A. Edison and Al Capone to see who could get rich quicker?

The fundamental significance of Apollo 11’s triumph is not political; it is philosophical; specifically, moral-epistemological.

The lunar landing as such was not a milestone of science, but of technology. Technology is an applied science, i.e., it translates the discoveries of theoretical science into practical application to man’s life. As such, technology is not the first step in the development of a given body of knowledge, but the last; it is not the most difficult step, but it is the ultimate step, the implicit purpose, of man’s quest for knowledge.

The lunar landing was not the greatest achievement of science, but its greatest visible result. The greatest achievements of science are invisible: they take place in a man’s mind; they occur in the form of a connection integrating a broad range of phenomena. The astronaut of an earlier mission who remarked that his spacecraft was driven by Sir Isaac Newton understood this issue. (And if I may be permitted to amend that remark, I would say that Sir Isaac Newton was the copilot of the flight; the pilot was Aristotle.) In this sense, the lunar landing was a first step, a beginning, in regard to the moon, but it was a last step, an end product, in regard to the earth — the end product of a long, intellectual-scientific development.

This does not diminish in any way the intellectual stature, power, or achievement of the technologists and the astronauts; it merely indicates that they were the worthy recipients of an illustrious heritage, who made full use of it by the exercise of their own individual ability. (The fact that man is the only species capable of transmitting knowledge and thus capable of progress, the fact that man can achieve a division of labor, and the fact that large numbers of men are required for a large-scale undertaking, do not mean what some creeps are suggesting: that achievement has become collective.)

I am not implying that all the men who contributed to the flight of Apollo 11 were necessarily rational in every aspect of their lives or convictions. But in their various professional capacities — each to the extent that he did contribute to the mission — they had to act on the principle of strict rationality.

The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11’s flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist’s emphasis on the dimensions of reason’s power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is.

This was the cause of the world’s response to the flight of Apollo 11.

Frustration is the leitmotif in the lives of most men, particularly today — the frustration of inarticulate desires, with no knowledge of the means to achieve them. In the sight and hearing of a crumbling world, Apollo 11 enacted the story of an audacious purpose, its execution, its triumph, and the means that achieved it — the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential. Whatever his particular ability or goal, if a man is not to give up his struggle, he needs the reminder that success is possible; if he is not to regard the human species with fear, contempt, or hatred, he needs the spiritual fuel of knowing that man the hero is possible.

This was the meaning and the unidentified motive of the millions of eager, smiling faces that looked up to the flight of Apollo 11 from all over the remnants and ruins of the civilized world. This was the meaning that people sensed, but did not know in conscious terms — and will give up or betray tomorrow. It was the job of their teachers, the intellectuals, to tell them. But it is not what they are being told.

A great event is like an explosion that blasts off pretenses and brings the hidden out to the surface, be it diamonds or muck. The flight of Apollo 11 was “a moment of truth”: it revealed an abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities that has to be measured in terms of interplanetary distances. If the achievements of the physical sciences have to be watched through a telescope, the state of the humanities requires a microscope: there is no historical precedent for the smallness of stature and shabbiness of mind displayed by today’s intellectuals.

In The New York Times of July 21, 1969, there appeared two whole pages devoted to an assortment of reactions to the lunar landing, from all kinds of prominent and semi-prominent people who represent a cross-section of our culture.

It was astonishing to see how many ways people could find to utter variants of the same bromides. Under an overwhelming air of staleness, of pettiness, of musty meanness, the collection revealed the naked essence (and spiritual consequences) of the basic premises ruling today’s culture: irrationalism — altruism — collectivism.

The extent of the hatred for reason was somewhat startling. (And, psychologically, it gave the show away: one does not hate that which one honestly regards as ineffectual.) It was, however, expressed indirectly, in the form of denunciations of technology. (And since technology is the means of bringing the benefits of science to man’s life, judge for yourself the motive and the sincerity of the protestations of concern with human suffering.)

“But the chief reason for assessing the significance of the moon landing negatively, even while the paeans of triumph are sung, is that this tremendous technical achievement represents a defective sense of human values, and of a sense of priorities of our technical culture.” “We are betraying our moral weakness in our very triumphs in technology and economics.” “How can this nation swell and stagger with technological pride when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities? While we can send men to the moon or deadly missiles to Moscow or toward Mao, we can’t get foodstuffs across town to starving folks in the teeming ghettos.” “Are things more important than people? I simply do not believe that a program comparable to the moon landing cannot be projected around poverty, the war, crime, and so on.” “If we show the same determination and willingness to commit our resources, we can master the problems of our cities just as we have mastered the challenge of space.” “In this regard, the contemporary triumphs of man’s mind — his ability to translate his dreams of grandeur into awesome accomplishments — are not to be equated with progress, as defined in terms of man’s primary concern with the welfare of the masses of fellow human beings . . . the power of human intelligence which was mobilized to accomplish this feat can also be mobilized to address itself to the ultimate acts of human compassion.” “But, the most wondrous event would be if man could relinquish all the stains and defilements of the untamed mind . . .”

There was one entirely consistent person in that collection, Pablo Picasso, whose statement, in full, was: “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.” His work has been demonstrating that for years.

The best statement was, surprisingly, that of the playwright Eugene Ionesco, who was perceptive about the nature of his fellow intellectuals. He said, in part:

It’s an extraordinary event of incalculable importance. The sign that it’s so important is that most people aren’t interested in it. They go on discussing riots and strikes and sentimental affairs. The perspectives opened up are enormous, and the absence of interest shows an astonishing lack of goodwill. I have the impression that writers and intellectuals — men of the left — are turning their backs to the event.

This is an honest statement — and the only pathetic (or terrible) thing about it is the fact that the speaker has not observed that “men of the left” are not “most people.”

Now consider the exact, specific meaning of the evil revealed in that collection: it is the moral significance of Apollo 11 that is being ignored; it is the moral stature of the astronauts — and of all the men behind them, and of all achievement — that is being denied. Think of what was required to achieve that mission: think of the unself-pitying effort; the merciless discipline; the courage; the responsibility of relying on one’s judgment; the days, nights and years of unswerving dedication to a goal; the tension of the unbroken maintenance of a full, clear mental focus; and the honesty (honesty means: loyalty to truth, and truth means: the recognition of reality). All these are not regarded as virtues by the altruists and are treated as of no moral significance.

Now perhaps you will grasp the infamous inversion represented by the morality of altruism.

Some people accused me of exaggeration when I said that altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation — and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone’s suffering.

You have seen it enacted in reality.

What else is the meaning of the brazen presumption of those who protest against the mission of Apollo 11, demanding that the money (which is not theirs) be spent, instead, on the relief of poverty?

This is not an old-fashioned protest against mythical tycoons who “exploit” their workers, it is not a protest against the rich, it is not a protest against idle luxury, it is not a plea for some marginal charity, for money that “no one would miss.” It is a protest against science and progress, it is the impertinent demand that man’s mind cease to function, that man’s ability be denied the means to move forward, that achievement stop — because the poor hold a first mortgage on the lives of their betters.

By their own assessment, by demanding that the public support them, these protesters declare that they have not produced enough to support themselves — yet they present a claim on the men whose ability produced so enormous a result as Apollo 11, declaring that it was done at their expense, that the money behind it was taken from them. Led by their spiritual equivalents and spokesmen, they assert a private right to public funds, while denying the public (i.e., the rest of us) the right to any higher, better purpose.

I could remind them that without the technology they damn, there would be no means to support them. I could remind them of the pretechnological centuries when men subsisted in such poverty that they were unable to feed themselves, let alone give assistance to others. I could say that anyone who used one-hundredth of the mental effort used by the smallest of the technicians responsible for Apollo 11 would not be consigned to permanent poverty, not in a free or even semi-free society. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not their practice that I challenge, but their moral premise. Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others — misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement — failure is not a mortgage on success — suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence — man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar or for anyone’s cause — life is not one huge hospital.

Those who suggest that we substitute a war on poverty for the space program should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded. The answer applies as well to the values and premises of the astronauts’ admirers. Slums are not a substitute for stars.

The question we are constantly hearing today is: why are men able to reach the moon, but unable to solve their social-political problems? This question involves the abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities. The flight of Apollo 11 has made the answer obvious: because, in regard to their social problems, men reject and evade the means that made the lunar landing possible, the only means of solving any problem — reason.

In the field of technology, men cannot permit themselves the kind of mental processes that have been demonstrated by some of the reactions to Apollo 11. In technology, there are no gross irrationalities such as the conclusion that since mankind was united by its enthusiasm for the flight, it can be united by anything (as if the ability to unite were a primary, regardless of purpose or cause). There are, in technology, no evasions of such magnitude as the present chorus of slogans to the effect that Apollo 11’s mission should somehow lead men to peace, goodwill, and the realization that mankind is one big family. What family? With one-third of mankind enslaved under an unspeakable rule of brute force, are we to accept the rulers as members of the family, make terms with them, and sanction the terrible fate of the victims? If so, why are the victims to be expelled from the one big human family? The speakers have no answer. But their implicit answer is: We could make it work somehow, if we wanted to!

In technology, men know that all the wishes and prayers in the world will not change the nature of a grain of sand.

It would not have occurred to the builders of the spacecraft to select its materials without the most minute, exhaustive study of their characteristics and properties. But, in the humanities, every sort of scheme or project is proposed and carried out without a moment’s thought or study of the nature of man. No instrument was installed aboard the spacecraft without a thorough knowledge of the conditions its functions required. All kinds of impossible, contradictory demands are imposed on man in the humanities with no concern for the conditions of existence he requires. No one tore apart the circuits of the spacecraft’s electric system and declared: “It will do the job if it wants to!” This is the standard policy in regard to man. No one chose a type of fuel for Apollo 11 because he “felt like it,” or ignored the results of a test because he “didn’t feel like it,” or programmed a computer with a jumble of random, irrelevant nonsense he “didn’t know why.” These are the standard procedures and criteria accepted in the humanities. No one made a decision affecting the spacecraft by hunch, by whim, or by sudden, inexplicable “intuition.” In the humanities, these methods are regarded as superior to reason. No one proposed a new design for the spacecraft, worked out in every detail, except that it had no provision for rockets or for any means of propulsion. It is the standard practice in the humanities to devise and design social systems controlling every aspect of man’s life, except that no provision is made for the fact that man possesses a mind and that his mind is his means of survival. No one suggested that the flight of Apollo 11 be planned according to the rules of astrology, and its course be charted by the rules of numerology. In the humanities, man’s nature is interpreted according to Freud, and his social course is prescribed by Marx.

But — the practitioners of the humanities protest — we cannot treat man as an inanimate object. The truth of the matter is that they treat man as less than an inanimate object, with less concern, less respect for his nature. If they gave to man’s nature a small fraction of the meticulous, rational study that the scientists are now giving to lunar dust, we would be living in a better world. No, the specific procedures for studying man are not the same as for studying inanimate objects — but the epistemological principles are.

Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man’s reason. Yes, reason could solve human problems — but nothing else on earth or beyond it can.

This is the fundamental lesson to be learned from the triumph of Apollo 11. Let us hope that some men will learn it. But it will not be learned by most of today’s intellectuals, since the core and motor of all their incredible constructs is the attempt to establish human tyranny as an escape from what they call “the tyranny” of reason and reality.

If the lesson is learned in time, the flight of Apollo 11 will be the first achievement of a great new age; if not, it will be a glorious last — not forever, but for a long, long time to come.

I want to mention one small incident, an indication of why achievement perishes under altruist-collectivist rule. One of the ugliest aspects of altruism is that it penalizes the good for being the good, and success for being success. We have seen that, too, enacted in reality.

It is obvious that one of the reasons motivating the NASA administrators to achieve a lunar landing was the desire to demonstrate the value of the space program and receive financial appropriations to continue the program’s work. This was fully rational and proper for the managers of a government project: there is no honest way of obtaining public funds except by impressing the public with a project’s actual results. But such a motive involves an old-fashioned kind of innocence; it comes from an implicit free-enterprise context, from the premise that rewards are to be earned by achievement, and that achievement is to be rewarded. Apparently, they had not grasped the modern notion, the basic premise of the welfare state: that rewards are divorced from achievement, that one obtains money from the government by giving nothing in return, and the more one gets, the more one should demand.

The response of Congress to Apollo 11 included some prominent voices who declared that NASA’s appropriations should be cut because the lunar mission has succeeded.(!) The purpose of the years of scientific work is completed, they said, and “national priorities” demand that we now pour more money down the sewers of the war on poverty.

If you want to know the process that embitters, corrupts, and destroys the managers of government projects, you are seeing it in action. I hope that the NASA administrators will be able to withstand it.

As far as “national priorities” are concerned, I want to say the following: we do not have to have a mixed economy, we still have a chance to change our course and thus to survive. But if we do continue down the road of a mixed economy, then let them pour all the millions and billions they can into the space program. If the United States is to commit suicide, let it not be for the sake and support of the worst human elements, the parasites-on-principle, at home and abroad. Let it not be its only epitaph that it died paying its enemies for its own destruction. Let some of its lifeblood go to the support of achievement and the progress of science. The American flag on the moon — or on Mars, or on Jupiter — will, at least, be a worthy monument to what had once been a great country.