Russia

Immediately after 9/11 it occurred to me that if USA allied with Russia then no force in the world would be able to compete with that alliance. There was a brief moment when that looked like it might happen when USA's military turned toward Arab terrorism rather than great power conflict and Russia was dealing with similar enemies (as was China) rather than being an inhibitor to American goals. That alliance didn't take shape.

Vladimir Putin was still fairly new at the job of Russian premier and when George W. Bush said that he felt that he could "trust" Putin, it brought down a firestorm from the Western intelligentsia. Rather than seeing a Bush-Putin accord as an overwhelming force, the critics saw a potential detente as a sign of Bush's stupidity in the face of Putin's cold calculation. Whether Bush actually took this criticism to heart is debatable (though I believe he probably he did) because USA's response to 9/11 was a unilateral move that shrugged off traditional American allies and enemies in a desire to go it alone. I don't think this was a response to Putin, rather I'd say it was triggered by France (in the Security Council) and Germany (in NATO) instead. I think Bush saw unilateralism as a preferred option anyway, as going in with UN and/or NATO approval would've limited USA's military capabilities, would've put Syria (a Security Council member at the time) in the chain of command, would've put Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds at odds, and might've sparked a militaristic movement in Germany, which would only have complicated the task of tracking down al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, Putin fought Islamic terrorists on his own instead of in concert with the Americans.

The way Bush backed away from a potential Russian alliance was indicative of the general American opinion of Putin. Presidents are American political animals that aren't terribly close to foreign leaders so they are reliant on military and intelligence advisers to shape their perceptions (and/or their rhetoric). The Pentagon's initial perception would've been that Putin was the iron fist behind the velvet glove of Yeltsin, that Putin was a return to the norm of Russian dictators after a brief period of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. That Putin is nothing but trouble has remained the American attitude for the last 20 years. Bill Clinton had no interest in dealing with Putin, George Bush had a moment of wanting to make Putin an ally but that passed quickly, and Obama was resolved to keep Putin at arm's length (*) for his entire tenure in office. And that's just the Oval Office response. Think of all the high level advisers during that time who saw Putin as the #1 threat to American interests in the world: Madeline Albright, William Cohen, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Admiral Mullen, Robert Gates, General Shalikashvili, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, and I think we can comfortably add General Mattis, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton to that list, as well.

I listened to two Russian author interviews recently that left me with a coupla details about Putin that have stayed with me: 1) when Boris Yeltsin was grooming Putin to succeed him back in the 1990s, Putin actually wanted to be made the CEO of Gazprom instead; Yeltsin refused to hear it but Putin didn't really want to be the leader of Russia; 2) all Putin has ever wanted to is to be down with the President of the United States; he thought he had that with Bush after 9/11 but that honeymoon never really got started before Bush was done with him (and virtually all other foreign leaders). I bring these details up because Donald Trump represents a clear difference from previous administrations. And though Trump is surrounded by Generals, he is clearly a guy that shrugs off advice when it suits him.

Trump, a non-politician, has met Putin in social company before. And would he have been paranoid of Putin? No. Quite the opposite! Trump probably sees Putin as a failure, a guy that's never really accomplished anything, a guy whose power has steadily eroded since he first appeared. Trump would respect Putin for being a really rich guy who has a firm grip on the Russian electorate, but a guy's whose foreign influence keeps shrinking and is hardly a threat at all. Trump would pity Putin for getting stuck with Russia when he really wanted a Gazprom (isn't Trump in the same situation now?Could've been a media tycoon instead he's stuck running the country). Since Putin came to power NATO and EU have grown right to his border, numerous former Soviet states are homes to Islamic Jihad, China is poaching central Asia, the Americans keep banging on North Korea, Turkey is pushing back in the Black Sea, Iran is pushing back in the Caucuses, Ukraine fell from his grasp and is now just a quagmire (**), and outside of Syria, he has no allies and no prospects for the future. Why on earth are we so afraid of him? He's done nothing but get smaller since he took power, yet we continue to act like he's Genghis Khan leading hordes to our doorstep.

Russia is naturally isolated. The terrain and the climate are harsh and the population is self-reliant and hearty. Diplomatically they continue to get even more isolated to the point where to me the danger is that Russia descends into a North Korea-like state where weapons and tough talk are their only exports. The difference is that Russia is a mighty nation that already has a nuclear arsenal--and knows what to do with it! And a population of 150 million people that have lurched toward becoming a productive middle class since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ehhh....okay....not sure Russia has really embraced the potential of free markets to give people opportunities free from gov't interference but a steady diet of embargoes and sanctions isn't helping the Russian economy. Yeah, the society is still riven by inequality, the electoral process is clearly a joke and there is only the slightest burgeoning of a free media, but it feels like more people have more control over their time and money than in the Soviet days. Russia could've collapsed into pure chaos and instead has soldiered along fairly well considering the West hasn't been any more helpful than any other time in history.

I've always kinda liked Putin because I think he's tried to navigate through the post-Soviet economy in a manner that allows a middle class to develop, that allows people to get educated and make the most of their economic opportunities. And if that strikes you as a rosy-glass observation, take a look back at Russia's history--there are no Abe Lincolns, no George Washingtons, not a single Gandhi in 1000 years of history! Russians have had a steady diet of iron-fisted tyrants and Putin strikes me as the most progressive leader they've ever had. Putin has a firm grip on his domestic constituency (as shown by his recent "landslide" re-election) but in terms of foreign policy he's at the mercy of global markets that are mostly unavailable to him or simply not in his favor.

The recent National Defense Strategy paper that signaled a move away from international terrorism and back to a focus on great powers (meaning Russia and China), takes us back to a potential alliance--in the long run. Making enemies is, for USA, the first step to making friends. When we fight an enemy, we beat the enemy, then we re-build a friend (***). That's the American way. But in this case we don't have to make war with Russia. Russia is in desperate need of friends, all we have to do is ally with them.

Now the news is filled with stories of Europeans expelling Russian diplomats and recalling their own from Russia in response to the attempted murder of a former Russian spy living the UK. (****) An already isolated Putin is about to get even lonelier. I don't see this as a good policy. Isolation leaves Russia with only military options and pushes them to ally with those that bedevil the West. We're allowing vague talk of Russian spycraft to cloud our judgement. We're letting domestic political memes to shape our foreign policy agenda. Instead of using Trump to make peace, we're encouraging him to make war. Instead of the Brits covering up spy stuff--which stays hidden 99% of the time--they're using it as political ammo.

The idea that the West can bully Russia into belching up another Yeltsin seems foolhardy at best. Putin's guaranteed to last another five years and though there is talk of his potential retirement, if he feels Russia is under attack, he'll stick around. Or worse: he'll be replaced by Putin 2.0.

Mikhail Gorbachev ain't walking through that door, folks. If we keep pushing Russia we may just push them into full fledged paranoid nihilism. Are we ready to topple all of civilization over some fucking Facebook ads? Putin still craves respect from the West. And the potential for war is all he's got left. It's going to get worse before it gets better--and I think it will get better. But not any time soon.


(*) During the 2008 election I thought the only clear advantage McCain had over Obama was Putin. I thought Obama was too green and Putin might eat him alive. I think Obama had a similar feeling and basically stayed away from Putin as much as possible for 8 years seeing him as nothing but a fox seeking a hen house.

(**) In the West we see Putin's aggression in Ukraine as a sign of his thirst for dominance. I'd suggest it's the exact opposite: he used to control Ukraine, he used to wake up every morning knowing that Ukraine was all his, then that fell apart and now he has to send in troops just to keep it half-together. That's not power, that's the erosion of power. And isn't Syria the same way? Syria was a reliable ally for decades but in the last 5 years or so, the place has fallen to shit and Putin has to exert all his energy just to keep it from completely shattering. That ain't how Bill Belichick wins games.

(***) And the flip side: we never went to war with Brazil, for example, we've just subtly bullied them for 200 years so we don't see them now as an enemy or an ally. We see Africa as a charity rather than an investment because we've never feared it enough to make war with it or needed it enough to co-opt it. We still don't know what to do with Cuba because, outside of two weeks in 1962, we've never thought about besting it and thus don't know how to be friends or enemies now. Our wars shape our peace.

(****) This may come off as incredibly naive but what the fuck do I care if spies kill each other? The initial reports I saw said that he was retired but lately I've seen more that say he was still in contact with British agencies, so was he working on something that makes this attack meaningful? Indeed, why would the British gov't even acknowledge his existence or his attempted murder--isn't outing a spy in public a crime?--so what is significant about this guy? If this is just old fashioned spy-vs-spy payback, then why are embassies around the globe removing diplomats? So should we assume that this guy was...say...spying on Russia...in which case, back to my previous question of why the fuck do I care if spies kill each other? This is either much deeper than it looks or just a lame excuse to get pissed at Putin, either way we're not getting the full story. (And isn't the guy's current condition awfully similar to how Yassar Arafat and Ariel Sharon both went out? Should the conspiracy theorists be digging up those bodies, too?)

Cambridge Analytica

Here's a BBC4 expose on how Cambridge Analytica worked for Donald Trump's campaign:


(Spoiler alert) These guys are taking credit for Trump's victory in 2016 because of their ability to target on-line media toward undecided voters which they say tipped the scale for Trump. The men shown here are pleased with their ability to inject ideas into the social fabric with virtually no record of having done so.

Okay. Is that illegal? Based on all those books in the library, I'm going to suggest that disseminating ideas through words and pictures is not illegal (or even out of the ordinary). Did this make any difference in the 2016 USA election? Possibly, but I don't see how the effect of this is any different from ordinary political advertising. I worked briefly for a political ad agency that specialized in 1-page mailers targeted to specific neighborhoods during specific elections (*). Did these mailers turn the tide for the incumbent? I don't know. Maybe. But I assure you my bosses took credit for the win.

So, assuming these Cambridge Analytica guys are not completely full of shit (a big assumption, actually), is this illegal activity? Maybe, but let's dig deeper into their methods.

Here's an interview with a Cambridge Analytica insider (Christopher Wylie):


So they created an app (well, they paid someone else to develop it, so not even proprietary technology--sheesh!), that collects the Facebook profiles of the friends of the users of the app. Is that illegal (**)? Aren't Facebook profiles out there for free to be collected? Data collection of public profiles doesn't strike me as illegal, indeed all they did was expedite the ability to collect the data. And how many profiles did they actually collect and how important was it to the mission? This whistleblower doesn't seem to know.

So the collection of the data doesn't seem illegal, what they did with the data doesn't seem illegal, so what just got exposed here?

Social media allows people to communicate with each other on-line in clumps, such that the exponential effect of your friends and their friends and the friends of their friends can get very large very quickly. Mining all of that data can give you a big pile of information and what Cambridge Analytica seems to have done is create a method for quickly piling up Facebook profiles. (I'm going to ignore the sidebar about private messages because Wylie is not specific about how that is even possible or what that info yielded) This amount of info is fine for creating big broad abstractions but I'd suggest it's of virtually no use to get people to vote a certain way. You can pick out which voters are more important than others (hardly an exact science, but it could be useful for targeting your message) and then pummel them with the types of ads you want them to be susceptible to (which incidentally is what Facebook itself is doing to you all day every day). But if that were actually effective then Coke would've run Pepsi out of business years ago (or vice versa).

How is any of this out of the ordinary? How is any of this illegal? How does any of this relate to Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, who was surely using some other company that wasn't good, I presume)?

The candidate hires people to do all this political stuff. The candidate hires people to tell him what speech to give to what audience, for example, or which donors are more likely to give up big bucks and which should just be ignored. The candidate hires people to print handbills and bumper stickers and then distribute them in different times and places. The candidate doesn't do any of this stuff--indeed, it's better if they don't really understand how this stuff works.

And does it work? Well Cambridge Analytica is eager to make people think this system works. Remember: Cambridge Analytica gets paid for what it can make people think it can do, not for what it actually does....which is virtually impossible to detect--by its own design! Perfect for conspiracy theorists (and dimwitted but extremely wealthy political candidates).

Meanwhile, the FBI is also probing college basketball and getting splashy headlines about shoe companies and assistant coaches paying for players to go to certain schools and sign with certain agents, managers, etc. Why do I bring this up? Because college coaches are similarly insulated from the recruiting tactics of their underlings and boosters (over whom the coaches have no control whatsoever). The coach is given a list of players to pursue and puts on his best salesman smile to greet the parents in the living room. The money that changes hands never goes through the head coach (it better not anyway!). We all know money changes hands...this is hardly surprising, right?

College sports is thoroughly corrupt, it always has been and we know this. Like politics, college sports has a framework that has been in place for years that is thoroughly corrupt and everyone has always known it. This is not a grand conspiracy theory, this is just the way of things: players don't always get paid....but some do.

But if the corruption itself is always meant to skew competitive balance, then how did this happen:

UMBC 74-54 Virginia


Why aren't we blaming Putin for this? This is waaaaaay more shocking than Trump defeating Hillary! And waaaaay more out of the ordinary than any of the shenanigans so far reported in the 2016 election--that was a 135-game winning streak that went down.

Look, social media is full of nonsense messages from unknown sources. So is the Bible, so is the Encyclopedia Britannica, so is virtually any history book ever written and your daily horoscope. Even well known stories sometimes turn out to be mostly false, such as this new investigation into the Tulip Mania of the 1630s shows (https://theconversation.com/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of-a-dutch-financial-bubble-is-mostly-wrong-91413). The opposite happens too: the Iliad and the Odyssey were thought to be merely fanciful works of imagination until Heinrich Schliemann dredged up evidence of just such a battle in ancient Troy.

The difference now is there are more people than ever before spreading more versions of "truth" than ever before and more people listening to what everyone else is saying. There's more content for more audience and ever larger emotions that must go into it all. We all know what a viral video is, the concept by now is well-ingrained. Still my favorite:


Rather than proving collusion--or even criminality--during the 2016 election, this shows me that that was as perfectly normal an election as we've ever had in this country. This isn't out of the ordinary at all, this is just how we do things. I still believe--more firmly than ever!--that the reason Donald Trump is president is because the American people went to the polls and voted for him. I still don't know why, maybe crappy viral videos on Facebook is the answer. I doubt it but I suppose its possible. But even if that were true...so what? How is this different or criminal? Did we get into the Spanish-American War based on great information? Did we really understand the implications of the San Francisco Gold Rush or the Mexican War or the brokered Democratic Convention of 1852? Why on earth did Americans vote for Richard Nixon or Benjamin Harrison or Warren G. Harding? Who knows? People do weird shit.

Personally I think these Cambridge Analytica guys are just a bunch of shit talkin' capitalists. They get paid to help candidates do stuff that candidates typically know nothing about, thus these guys are bragging about their achievements when I'm not convinced they achieved anything at all. (***) This is the digital version of alchemy. Don't forget: for hundreds of years the best educated minds of the Western world spent their time trying to convert lead into gold...didn't work. Smart people do stupid shit, too. Furthermore, this does not prove collusion with Donald Trump (in fact, I'd say it proves the exact opposite) or Vladimir Putin (who I'm guessing had never heard of Cambridge Analytica until BBC4's "expose"). I can't help thinking this investigation is just a grand effort of sublimation, this is the gov'ts way of helping the citizenry to ignore the fact that we spend way too much time on Facebook.

As for the 2016 election: hey, don't blame me, I voted for Grumpy Cat.


(*) The run-off of the 1999 San Francisco mayor's race to be precise, which you can read about here: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_mayoral_election,_1999). Hmmm....the Wikipedia page doesn't mention soft money coming in from Sweden, but I heard tales about it at the time.
(**) He does suggest that they were also getting "some" private messages, though he doesn't explain how that happened or how many people were affected by this or how they used the information collected. This is almost surely illegal but doesn't seem to have been the key to any of their technical successes.
(***) Isn't the lesson here that a 3rd party can pick out states with enough electoral votes, then cherry pick the 4 or 5 things those districts have in common and then groom a candidate to say nothing but those things? I presume you wouldn't even need the whole states, just a bunch of districts within those states that could turn the whole electoral count. Isn't that what Cambridge Analytica basically saying that they just did?