New Pearl Harbor

Version 0.5

Politically Correct Zen Repudiation of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin

Funny story about contagion and guilt by association here. The only logical result of assuming that the NSA knows that I've 'touched' this book is to publicly repudiate it in the most forceful terms. Easy enough, but is that even adequate? America has fallen down such an insane rabbit's hole that not only are books like this one being published, but a lot of people are buying into them and we're even electing patently insane reality-challenged politicians like Ted Cruz in Texas. You know what they say: Everything's bigger and more crazy in Texas!

So now the question facing me is how to most clearly demonstrate that I am not an insane conspiracy theorist, if I can. After all, I think that I have been contaminated to some degree. While I can dismiss all of the ideas in this particular book, the problem is that I still believe in some conspiracies. Actually, this book uses the most obvious and relevant example: Everyone believes that there was a secret conspiracy to attack the WTC, but the devil is in the details of who was involved and how they pulled it off. A more troublesome example involves the murder of Michael Hastings. Can you believe that his brand of insanity was so dangerous that it could only be 'cured' by hacking his car to kill him? Having considered the problem, I think the best way to repudiate this book is to approach from two angles: (1) a specific destruction of a major point of the book and (2) an alternative and Occamic explanation. However, to make the repudiation stronger, I'm going to apply these perspectives twice, once at a low level and again at the highest level.

There are so many crazy points in the book that it is impossible to pick the best one for detailed refutation. For example, the lack of interception is mostly predicated on not knowing how planes actually fly and maneuver or how humans make decisions under pressure. However, I've decided to focus on the collapse of three buildings in the WTC complex. This author is arguing for the use of explosives, while simultaneously managing to refute himself. The most obvious refutation was his note that explosive-sniffing dogs were in the twin towers up to 5 days before 9/11. That only leaves two lines of analysis: (1) Large quantities of explosives were already in place and trained experts completely failed to detect them, or (2) Large quantities of explosives were were rapidly brought into the towers without anyone detecting the operation. The conspiracy extremists can try to cover those paths with bribery, but... It's hard to reliably bribe dogs and the it's fundamentally impossible to hush up a large number number of people. Even if none of them knew they were handling explosives at the time, many of them would have figured it out afterwards and some of them would have started talking. However, the main reason I reject this idea is that there would have been extremely large quantities of debris contaminated with explosives residue, and that physical evidence could not be completely eliminated no matter how quickly they cleared it away. You have to add a completely new level of insanity to believe that the Chinese would actually destroy all of the evidence once it was in their possession. I certainly think you can rest assured that the Chinese version of the CIA took plenty of samples hoping for something to use for blackmail against America's politicians.

Time for Occam's razor to cut this idea to size. What the book doesn't talk much about is the computer analyses of the structural failures. Once you know that a thing is possible, it's relatively easy to show how it happened. Before these collapses, the computer models seemed to show they were not possible, but afterwards, we sadly know much better. The author actually touches just barely on how the initially local failures unzipped the links between one floor and the vertical framework in each of the buildings that collapsed. Once the failures spread enough for that floor to settle downward, nothing was going to stop the force of gravity from finishing the job, and how. As soon as the failures were adequately modeled, there was little reason to delay the cleanup. The only physical evidence you could hope for would be recognizable traces of some of the original joints around the points of the initial local failures, or some of the neighboring joints that failed in the second stage of spreading, and the odds of finding those few joints in a recognizable state would be pretty microscopic given the vast amount of rubble. Virtually all of the joints were simply sheared to small bits as gravity did its work.

Now let's go to the highest level of the grand conspiracy. In this form, we wind up with an army of accomplices. Even if they didn't know what they were doing at the time, as in the previously mentioned idea of a large crew of people moving explosives without knowing what they were moving, they have had many years to figure it out. Even if they didn't want to talk at the time, they have had many years to change their minds, or even to die of natural causes and leave the evidence behind them if they didn't want to face retaliation. There are too many old sayings and even jokes about how to keep secrets, but the point is always the need for as few conspirators as possible, and all of the grand conspiracy theories totally fail on this point. It's possible to conceive how one or a few people could have killed Michael Hastings, but orchestrating a vast conspiracy with vast guilt trips for all of the conspirators? No, that is beyond my conception, and I even insist that my imagination is far wilder than average.

So what is Occam's answer? It really is hard to explain the low quality of the investigations of the 9/11 attacks. In addition, any explanation has to hold up on the long term. Therefore, I conclude that there were massive failures and plenty of blame, but the failures were obvious and bipartisan. Not sure if this is the truth, or if the truth even matters, and you also have to make allowances that I am currently under the influence of this crazy book, too, but... My theory today is that certain people within the ISI were intimately involved in the planning for the 9/11 attacks, mostly because they hoped to move America to support Pakistan more closely in an alliance against 'non-state' terrorists. It is even possible that members of the CIA or NSA were aware of this conspiracy but regarded it as fundamentally too crazy to succeed and too flawed to cause significant damage even if it partly happened. The actual amount of damage was much worse than anyone imagined, apparently even including Osama Bin Ladin himself. However, I believe that there were internal and secret investigations that quickly determined these problematic facts. These facts were even more extremely problematic because they also showed the intimate relationship between the ISI and the CIA, and they were bipartisan problems since they started with that good-intentioned Democrat Jimmy Carter, continued through the presidencies of Reagan and Poppy Bush and Clinton, and were still there under Dubya's watch. Maybe there was even an element of truth to the New American Century angle, but in the relatively passive sense that the big dick Cheney downgraded the priority of anti-terrorism efforts. I've often felt that some of his extreme reactions as described in The One Percent Doctrine smack of an extremely guilty conscience... No one can be sure about Cheney, however, since he's always been such a cocksure extremist.

So to summarize it to Occam's satisfaction, from their perspective, there was no reason for a public investigation, since they knew almost exactly what had happened and how, and it was extremely embarrassing to EVERYONE involved, no matter what their political persuasions. The bipartisan mess must have been big enough to persuade even President Obama to let it lie. This is kind of like the gerrymandering thing. Both parties are quite willing to work together against the public's interests to protect their own behinds, but just about the one thing all of the professional politicians can agree on is that they should be allowed to stay in office. As this theory applies to 9/11, it's still a bit surprising that none of the people in the know has clearly revealed the truth, but the total number of people carefully watching each other is within the bounds of reason, or at least my reason.

Now it's time for the zen trick, eh? The real significance of this kind of book is what it reveals about the mental instability of America. Our reality makes so little sense that many people are able to look at the wildest conspiracies and take them seriously. I think the one that is bothering me the most these days actually involves the chronic problems with my Android devices. I don't think it is simply the google's growing EVIL as typified by "All of your attention is belongs to the google" leading to large-scale incompetence. I've reached the point of believing the flakiness is linked to snooping software being deployed on a wholesale level. It might be criminals, except that I think they could be and would already have been nailed by following the money trails. Therefore at this point it seems most plausible, even to such a rational and level-headed individual as yours truly, that the real cause is government-driven snooping. We're back to the old joke about the lost quarter:

"Let me help you for your lost quarter. Exactly where were you standing when you noticed it was missing?"

"I was in Afghanistan."

"But Afghanistan is thousands of kilometers from here. Why are you looking here?"

"The light's much better here."

In other words, I'm not a terrorist and I don't even know any terrorists, no matter how much I stretch my rubbery imagination. However, mostly because of my Android devices, I am standing where the light is good. It's convenient for the NSA to harvest my personal information, and so they do, but with a certain amount of bugginess that shows. Since it's Android and since the google has gone all evil on us, it seems most likely that it's driven from America, but we could speculate about the Chinese intelligence agencies, too. Not really anything personal about me (though the game of six degrees of Keven Bacon might argue otherwise), but just cheap data. If you actually are a person of interest and they want to put some actual resources into investigating what you're up to, you might as well surrender now, Dorothy.

Have a lovely non-paranoid day.

P.S. Let me add a special encouragement to your replies and again clarify why I moderate the comments. I'm really interested in your points of disagreement, even if you are a sincere conspiracy theorist, but I'm absolutely opposed to spammers and I will not support them, even for the period until I can nuke their scammy ads. Once again we return to the deep EVIL of the google?

The Israel Lobby

Reactions to the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

I suppose that anyone who writes a review about this book that is even vaguely favorable must start out by saying they're not an antisemite. Well, I'm not. However I am anti-religious, especially when it comes to governments influenced by extremely religious people, and anti-fanatic, especially when it comes to anything. The Palestinians are a Semitic people anyway, though the sources say that the word "antisemitic" is usually specific to Jews in its usage.

The metaphor that came to me a few days after I finished this book was of the balance of blind justice, but with the fulcrum off center. In other words, what the so-called Israel lobby has done is move the fulcrum so that the human rights of the Israelis have lots of leverage and influence and even power in the American political system, while the various other considerations such as the human rights of the Palestinians or even America's own foreign-policy interests are practically without weight. On a physical scale, that would be like moving the fulcrum away from the Israel side, but the political situation is different, especially in that it is more multidimensional.

Overall their description of the situation seems quite insightful and accurate to me, and I've read a lot about the American political system and world history. The situation around Israel is exceedingly unreasonable, and there must be reasons why they can't reach any political accommodations for stable peace with their neighbors. Before reading this book, I felt that the primary obstacle was just the religious fanaticism of a relatively small group of Jewish extremists, but now I feel that the Israel lobby is quite significant, too.

The rational view of the situation is that Israel is a small country that can't indefinitely maintain hostilities against vastly larger enemies. The rational solution would be to engage in reasoned discussions in search of peace--but the example of the Israel lobby in America is that all reasoned discussions can by avoided, apparently indefinitely.

What Eisenhower Thinks

Version 0.6

How What Eisenhower Thinks by Allan Taylor Makes President Eisenhower Look Like a Failure

This book was actually published in 1953 and somehow found its way into the public library of Kasawaski-shi in Japan. It's an interesting collection of excerpts of Eisenhower's speeches and writings. The editing was mostly done after Ike had declined the 1948 Republican nomination and before he decided to run for President in the election of 1952. It seems pretty clear that the editor was a supporter hoping to encourage him to run.

I don't know whether or not this book contributed anything to Ike's change of heart, but it did change my feelings about Ike. On the one hand, it gave me more appreciation for his understanding of the problems that America was facing at the time and in the future. However, at the same time it made me feel that he was a failure as president, whereas before I was pretty much neutral about his presidency.

Before reading this book, I regarded President Eisenhower's greatest mistake as the interstate highway system. This was a really crucial decision and policy that helped make America dependent on private automobiles instead of mass transit. I've always felt that the decision was made primarily for short-sided reasons of military exigencies. Mass transit is militarily vulnerable and positionally useless. The facilities of mass transit are sitting ducks and just can't delivery troops to arbitrary destinations where the generals want to attack or need to defend. I'd like to see the exact statistics, but I've often felt the interstate highways were the #1 deep cause of America's harmful dependence on foreign oil.

I felt that Ike's greatest positive legacy was actually the defense of individual rights by the Supreme Court. However Ike himself regarded his two progressive appointments to the supreme court as his greatest presidential mistakes. Kind of hard to give him credit in that situation, even if the results were good. Yes, there were some important events in such areas as civil rights for blacks, but Ike was NOT leading the way, but basically just passively going along for the ride.

However, from reading this book, I felt that President Eisenhower deserves more criticism for knowing better and failing to do anything about the problems he understood. There are many examples in the book, but I'm just going to pick on two that struck me as especially interesting and significant.

One was his advocacy of universal military service. Obviously he did not succeed in leading the country to the adoption of such a policy. I actually agree with the basic idea, though without restricting it to military service. His focus was purely on military preparedness, but I'd prefer including options for various other forms of public service. My own preference would be a weighting system where the least pleasant forms would also be the shortest. For example, one year of military service versus two years of medical support or foreign aid work versus three years of teaching. Yes, I could have missed it, but I've never seen any evidence that he even managed to start a dialog on the topic.

Another area that rather surprised me was Eisenhower's advocacy of a stronger United Nations and inspections-based nuclear disarmament. Again, it seems pretty clear that he failed to move the country in those directions. Some of his comments about America working compatibly with the United Nations now seem downright laughable considering our obstructionist history there.

Considering the era, it's hard to blame him for the anti-communist stuff. However, that part certainly looks kind of laughable now. However, even in that area his understanding of the importance of non-military economic development as the foundation for real national strength makes his leadership look misguided.

In conclusion, if I were a presidential historian being asked for my ranking, President Eisenhower would drop several places because of this book. Remember that this was a contemporary work, not colored by later revisionism and fishing for the best things to remember.

What Happened

Notes for a Review of What Happened (Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception) by Scott McClellan

Hmm... It appears that "what happened" here was that I wrote up the following notes as I was reading the book, but then lost interest in doing a full review. The book was weak enough that isn't worth much effort, and I guess that is about as negative as a review can get? I definitely don't feel like rereading the book to refresh my memories, so I guess I'll just summarize the main impression that remains some months after reading the book: McClellan seems like a nice guy, but incredibly naive, and even though he was physically inside the White House at the time, either he was completely outside of the real discussions or he is a much better liar than I think he is. My main conclusion from reading the book was that he was just an innocent patsy, and that's why his version of the events became so hopeless tangled once he started noticing reality again.

Cheney's secret plot really to plant WMDs or evidence of an Al Qaeda link to Saddam?

Lots of missing topics and incidents.

Detailed notes as I read:

Page 14: Silly mistake of "legendary successor's expense" in reference to Sam Houston, his "predecessor", not "successor".

Page 58: Glaring counterfactual statement about the Florida recount. Gore did suggest a statewide recount. (Only to be expected that there was no mention anywhere in the book of the eventual recount.)

Page 116: His own muddled typology of lying: "Partisans in Washington have become very sophisticated in the ways they murk it up with partial truths, political spin, misrepresentations, distortion, and an overall lack of intellectual honesty." No acknowledgment of his involvement in any of these things, but I guess it hit me harder since Walter Cronkite had passed away a few days before.

Page 132: "He doesn't worry about acknowledging the holes in his case or the valid points against his own arguments." Basically trying to defend his own approach to his job, not noting that such a lawyer would be utterly incompetent and would be blindsided and destroyed every time he walked into a courtroom.

Page 162: The insertion "later determined to be unfounded" (about Dubya's speech with the infamous 16 words about uranium) is a major self-contradiction. Elsewhere in the book he's noted that the claim had been debunked and removed from a prior speech. However, this is mostly part of the larger self-contradiction of acknowledging the Dubya White House was a bubble while treating it like the universe. (Reminds me of the joke about the mathematician who puts the fence around himself and announces "I define myself as outside.")

Pages 165-6: 'the fact that a president "didn't know" may not be a meaningful defense'. I'm not sure why he tried to confuse the issue with the double quoted "didn't know", but I am sure that ignorance of the law is NO excuse.

Page 177: Hadley is offering to resign for "an honest mistake" is either a radical definition of "honest" or another example of delusional in-the-bubble thinking.

Page 179: The reference to "gotcha reporting" is another example of belittling or misrepresenting his opponents for the kind of spin he never acknowledged using.

Page 181: Dismissing Karl Rove's opponents as "partisan critics". I wonder what other basis Rove could possibly be evaluated on? Is there any non-partisan metric for Rove?

Page 191: He actually includes the dishonest or incompetent case analysis. However, on the next page he just dismisses it as an image problem, not a fundamental paradox of bad government.

Page 229: I was struck by his "we employed" where he vaguely acknowledges his own contribution to the "spin and evasion", though the main thrust of the book was how that wasn't his intention.

Page 238: Seems to be a self-contradiction with Dubya's "French Toast" joke, but maybe it was somehow funny in context. On it's face, it seems to be the only example of Dubya's humor and a contradiction to McClellan's claim that Dubya is actually a funny guy.

Pages 278-9: Defensive story of Dubya's guitar photo during the Katrina fiasco as a problem in public relations and a failure of the staff to protect Dubya from these sorts of things. Overall another good example of the internal contradiction of trying to portray Dubya as a responsible leader who crucially depends on his staff.

The Naked and the Dead

Another memorial book, since the author passed away just recently. Not up to even attempting a full review just now, so...

A few reactions to and comments about The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Starting with the spoiler alert and capsule review. I really can't say much of anything about this book without giving things away. However, it is a good book, and it's worth reading for its various merits, and if you're at all inclined to do so, for now you might as well take my word for it and you should go ahead and read it, and you can read my meanderings later on. I think you'll even be surprised by the way the book transitions, but I definitely think there's plenty of interesting material there. Now you've been warned, and I'm about to start giving things away. Are you sure you don't want to go read it first?

The book is mostly a character study, and even though the characters are fictitious, they feel amazingly true to life. He really does capture the spirit of real people and places all over America. Part of this is done in the shifting viewpoints of the main story of the battle for the imaginary island, but there are also 'time machine' snippets of mini-biographies of various characters.

The reason this is qualifies as a book Dubya wouldn't read is because of the profoundly anti-war message. At first it seems like it is glorifying the heroism of the soldiers, but in the end the whole thing just seems pointless. The leading character, the platoon sergeant, has to be dismissed as a vicious killer, and his brave men as a bunch of cowards who are just most afraid of him. One of the nicest characters in the book is the lieutenant who is set up and effectively murdered by the sadistic sergeant, though the Japanese do the actual shooting. The character that Mailer probably most closely identified himself with is killed by falling off a cliff for no particular reason in a pointless 'mission' that is ultimately aborted by a wasp's nest. Turned out that the outcome of the campaign had already been determined some months ago, but the American intelligence was so poor that they just didn't know it yet. If they had interrogated a few of the prisoners they were so eager to exercute, they would have known that, and the main result of the delay before they find out is to make the slaughter go more quickly in the end. Probably the most heroic effort in the entire book was the futile attempt to rescue the wounded soldier, but all that accomplishes is to cause a lot of extra suffering before he dies--and then they lose the body, too. The general's main concern is to rewrite the official history so he can claim credit for a flanking invasion that didn't matter, either.

There was an interesting part starting from page 247 about the big lie and the prediction that America would have a big Red scare and then slide into fascism. Considering when it was written (around 1946), that part of it looks pretty prescient, even amazing.

Hocus Pocus

Of course this book review is dedicated to the the author's memory, and I was motivated to read one of his books because he passed away recently. His last book was actually an inspired diatribe against Dubya, but neither the bookstore nor the library had it, so I settled on this one, which turned out to be another book Dubya obviously must have missed...

Review of Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut

This 1990 book is basically a science fiction story where the slightly future background (already in the past) is a downward projection from the Reagan years, and though that trend was somewhat disrupted by the Clinton presidency, it still seems to have a lot of rather good predictions considering when it was written. A lot of the detailed predictions should be updated, but by and large his main message stands up: Unconstrained and mindlessly selfish greed is a bad thing. The basic thesis is that the wealthy elite is betraying America by being stupid and by short-sightedly selling the nation's infrastructure to foreigners. His projection was for Japanese to remain as the #1 buyers, but now the #1 buyers have become the Chinese--though the Chinese are being rather sharper in their investments, doubtless based on their observations of the many impressive but non-productive investments made by the Japanese before them. At the close of Vonnegut's book the Japanese are basically writing off their American investments as worthless.

Another prominent projection is the explosion of prison populations, and that one looks to be sadly accurate. He also included a lot about problems created by privatization.

There's also a powerful anti-war message throughout the book, though he focuses mainly on the Vietnam War. He draws relatively little upon his own combat experience in WW II, but he still has an authentic grunt's-eye-view of Vietnam. However, I feel he is simply focused on the viciousness of war and the emotional costs of losing, but he doesn't consider the larger economic problems created by war in the same way as the other parts of the story deal with economic issues. That may be natural, since his personal experience of war was mostly the loser's perspective, even in WW II, where he spent much of his time in Europe as a POW.

The book reminds me of the main difference between fiction and real life. There are a lot of parts of the book that don't make sense as we normally describe 'sensible', thus putting the lie to the claim that fiction has to make sense. I think the more essential difference demonstrated by this book is that books are dense. Everything the author writes should contribute to a controlled description of his mental model, and the words should contribute to the goal of transmitting that model to the reader, and the efficiency with which an author does so could be taken as an important metric of the author's skill. Vonnegut scores high on that metric, even though part of his mental model is that lots of things don't make sense. The extra level of talent that qualified him as a great writer is how he wraps his message in sardonic tongue-in-cheek humor. The more important contrast between fiction and real life is that real life has lots of noise in the signals, and there are lots of things that should just be ignored. The author can skip forward (and backwards) to ignore the noise, but in real life, you just have to go through the less meaningful parts at exactly the same speed...

There isn't really any big moral or lesson to be drawn from this book, but it's still the kind of thing that might have given Dubya pause before making the colossal blunder of invading and occupying Iraq. Vonnegut's contrast between the soldiers' experiences at the end of the two wars (WW II when they were welcomed as winners and Vietnam where they were dismissed as losers) is rather haunting, and a sad omen for the fate of the soldiers currently in Iraq. If you can't afford to lose, you shouldn't play the game, and this book makes it more clear how and why we lost and why America can't afford that loss.