ISIS - Do Something Stupid Now

The "do something stupid" part of the title is a steal from a letter to the editor I wrote recently.  Here's a link to it:  http://blogs.seattletimes.com/northwestvoices/2014/06/14/iraq-wait-dont-do-something-stupid/.  A lot of people have weighed in on ISIS/ISIL since it became a hot topic back in June.  I accused them of being stupid then and unfortunately they have remained stuck in the same rut.  The details have changed a little.  But most bloviating on the subject still translates to "President Obama is wrong, wrong, wrong".  In spite of the many mistakes Obama has supposedly made things are actually somewhat improved, not than anyone has noticed.  So let's review.

In June ISIS (there was no argument at the time as to what it should be called) had just taken control of a large chunk of Iraq, mostly in Anbar province.  "They are unstoppable" was taken as gospel at the time.  The countdown clocks were started for how long it was going to take them to sweep in and take control of Baghdad.  Would it be weeks or only days?  But since then ISIS has in fact been stopped.  The Baghdad offensive never materialized.  ISIS has racked up some gains but it has suffered more losses.  In fact, the conventional wisdom now has it that they are on the defensive.

Between then and now we have had the Yazidi rescue.  The Yazidis are a religious minority that lived in an area that ISIS was able to gain control of.  A large number of them fled to Mt. Sinjar.  All the initial reporting and analysis indicated that they were doomed and that the world was in for another instance of genocide.  But the story has a happy ending.  The Yazidis were rescued in a complex coordinated effort.  There has been exactly zero praise of the President for pulling this off.  And so it goes.

The problem is that the media likes "bang bang".  Gun camera footage of a missile strike is very popular and is played endlessly on TV.  There were some missile strikes in the Yazidi rescue so that's what the media has focused on.  They were helpful but by themselves they would have been completely ineffective.  Let me focus on the immediate Yazidi rescue and then pull back and take a  look at the broader situation.

At the beginning of the incident, and by this I mean the beginning of the U.S. public's introduction to the incident, you had 50,000 Yazidis stuck on Mt. Sinjar.  They were surrounded by bloodthirsty and unstoppable ISIS troops and their complete destruction was just days away.  So what happened?  Well, the first thing that happened is that the U.S. launched some airstrikes from drones and manned aircraft.  This took out some ISIS artillery and put ISIS troops on notice that they would not be allowed a free hand.

Next, the U.S. airdropped some supplies -- food, water, medicine.  It wasn't enough to take care of 50,000 people but it put the Yazidis on notice that someone was paying attention.  The airdrops and missile attacks continued.  A rescue mission was flown in and a small number of Yazidis were evacuated.  Shortly thereafter Kurdish troops were able to move into the area and make contact with the Yazidis.  The Kurds opened a safe corridor along which the Yazidis were able to evacuate.  Everyone who wanted to leave the mountain was able to do so.  Finally, the number of Yazidis turned out to be substantially less than 50,000.  I believe that there are still people living on Mt. Sinjar but they are the people who have always lived there.  I also believe that ISIS has now lost interest in Mt. Sinjar.  That sounds like a big win for the good guys.  And the President can legitimately be given credit for a good chunk of this good news.  But the silence, as they say, has been deafening.  Now let's pull back and look at a wider context.  I am going to start by only pulling back far enough to look at Iraq.

So how did we, and by "we" I actually mean Iraq, get into this mess?  Iraq is a fantasy country.  It was brought into existence in the 1920s as the result of the collapse of the Ottomon empire and the machinations of the British and the French.  It is a mash up of a bunch of political, religious, and ethnic groups that suited the British and the French at the time but did not take into account any facts on the ground.  So it has no natural coherence.  That doesn't mean it can't be successful anyhow.  It hung together reasonably well until 2003 when we invaded it.  But it mostly hung together due to iron fisted domination by a small group of people at the top.  The last in this line was Saddam Hussein.  When the U.S. invaded they toppled the Hussein government and Iraq has been spiraling out of control since.  All the tensions Hussein had been keeping bottled up now were now able to escape.

And you had outside forces aiding and abetting this.  The Iranians favored the Shiites.  Saudi Arabia and others favored the Sunnis.  The long oppressed Kurdish minority saw an opportunity to finally gain some autonomy.  The U.S. acting from outside tried to exert some force to counteract this tendency to fragment.  But the Iraqis saw their chance to get control of their own affairs and took it.  Al Maliki was then able to operate independently.  He implemented policies favoring Shiites and Iran and tried (fairly successfully) to weaken his opponents.  The Kurds were able to fend him off to a considerable extent but the Sunnis, particularly those in Anbar province, weren't.

ISIS is at bottom a Sunni movement.  As such it has received a considerable amount of support from the Sunni Arab world.  It has also been lucky in that its local opponents have been weak.  It started out in Syria where it has been fighting the Assad regime.  There has been a full fledged civil war going on in Syria for more than three years now.  Sunnis in Syria see ISIS as fighting the Assad regime effectively on their behalf.  Syria is like Iraq in the sense that it is governed by a small minority.  Syria has large Sunni and Kurd populations both of whom have been oppressed.  ISIS has been able to leverage its position as "the Sunni savior" into effective control of a significant percentage of Syria.  At the moment the Assad regime is not in a position to do much about this.

Then early this year ISIS mounted an offensive into Iraq.  Theoretically Iraq has a large, well equipped, and well trained army.  But the problem is that The U.S. has insisted on a balanced force consisting of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, etc., all mixed together.  If it had worked this would be a good thing.  It is a key to the long term success of the Iraq that the U.S. envisions.  This Iraq would have its historic boundaries and would have all of its factions and minorities living together in peace and harmony.  But that is not the path Iraq seems to be on, no matter how fervently the U.S. wishes it were.  In the actual Iraq of today there is tremendous mistrust and a lot of jockeying for advantage.  In the Iraq of today the army is a hollow shell.

ISIS is not a hollow shell.  Their military forces are disciplined and effective.  ISIS was able to capture large swatches of Iraqi territory because they stuck to the Sunni areas where they received a friendly reception.  And they were opposed by a paper Iraqi army that dissolved under the slightest pressure.  The Kurds might have been able to effectively oppose ISIS.  But the al Maliki government  had starved Kurd military forces of supplies and equipment.  Why?  Because al Maliki did not want an effective and possibly hostile military force on his Northeastern flank.  So the Sunnis saw ISIS as liberators from the Shiite oppression of al Maliki.  The Shiites were defended by a hollow military force, the Iraqi Army.  And the Kurds had the will to fight but not the equipment and supplies.  It is not surprising that ISIS was able to rack up such impressive wins in the early days.  So what has happened since?

Lots.  The first thing that happened was that the Shiites had the pants scared off them.  Al Maliki had been involved in a nasty political fight for control of the official government of Iraq.  As "his guy" the Shiites were supporting him as were the Iranians.  So it looked like he would win in the end.  To the Shiites and the Iranians al Maliki was a good bet as a skilled inside fighter in the hard ball politics of Baghdad.  But the tactics he was using assumed that there was no serious outside threat.  With no serious outside threat it was ok to screw over the Sunnis and the Kurds and have an ineffective army.  But ISIS quickly convinced everyone in Baghdad that it was a serious outside threat.  That changed everything.

All of a sudden Baghdad was facilitating not impeding the flow of supplies and equipment to the Kurds.  And al Maliki stopped relying on the army.  Instead he turned to the all Shiite militias, many of whom had been trained and supported by the Iranians.  It was now more important to win military battles than political ones.  As a side effect of all this it looks like al Maliki is out.  With adequate supplies and equipment the fighting ability of the Kurds has miraculously increased immensely over night.  They were able (and willing) to organize the rescue of the Yazidis.  They have retaken territory from ISIS.  And it looks like they can retake even more.  The U.S. has continued to pitch in with intelligence and the odd airstrike.  And the airstrikes have continued to help.  But that is because there are boots on the ground to back them up.

Now let me back up even further.  There is a dirty little secret behind Arab extremism.  Most of it has been funded for decades by our "ally" Saudi Arabia.  The country is run by the House of Saud, the extended family of Ibn Saud, the first King of Saudi Arabia.  Back in the day the Saud family did a deal with the Wahhabi sect of Islam.  The family of Ibn Saud would be given a free hand to run the country.  In exchange the Wahhabis would be given control of the educational system and various "cultural components" of the government.  Specifically, they run the "religious police", who make sure that public behavior confirms to Wahhabi standards .  It will come as no surprise that the Wahhabis want to spread their ideas as broadly as possible.  They use their political power to do this.  They also encourage wealthy and/or powerful Saudis to donate money to advance the cause.  This has resulted in them being able to build and operate hundreds of Madrasas all over the world.  The Madrassas espouse Wahhabi ideas.  In a lot of the world the only way poor parents can get their children any education is to send them to one of these Wahhabi Madrassas.

The Wahhabis are very fundamentalist.  Perhaps their most well known adherent is Osama bin Laden.  Bin Laden's philosophy is well outside mainstream Islam but broadly compatible with Wahhabi beliefs.  So one of the big reasons that fundamentalism is widespread in the Arab world is the influence of the Wahhabi strain.  The Wahhabi strain has so much influence because it is so powerful within Saudi Arabia.  But we can't criticize Saudi Arabia because we depend on Saudi oil so heavily.  And it's not just Saudi Arabia.  This "buying off the religious people" tactic is practiced in a number of other oil rich Arab countries.  So we see Qatar and others doing the same kinds of things.  Qatar is another example of a tightly controlled government sitting on top of a country with a small population and a lot of oil.  You do what you have to do to stay in power.  So a dirty little secret of the ISIS magic formula is that it has been receiving a lot of support (usually quietly) from the Arab world.

So how do we deal with ISIS?  Step one is to stop listening to the "experts" on TV.  The rest of the plan comes straight out of the Obama play book, you know the one that the "experts" say doesn't exist.  Obama spent his first term repairing relationships with the rest of the world.  This is not always apparent because "take pot shots at the U.S." has been a popular pastime around the world for more than 50 years.  But the rest of the world knows they can deal with the Obama Administration.  The problem is that when things are going well it is usually more beneficial to give the U.S. grief.  But ISIS has changed the calculus.

ISIS represents a real threat.  So scoring a minor cheap shot off the U.S. is now counterproductive.  We have seen this most clearly with the Iraqis.  They have been giving the U.S. grief since Obama got into office.  If there is no down side then there is every reason to do it.  But now ISIS is knocking on the doors of Baghdad and threatening the flow of money, I mean oil, and threatening critical infrastructure like the Mosul dam.  So the Iraqi government is now cooperating with the U.S. and helping the Kurds out.  But we are also not getting any grief from Saudi Arabia or Qatar or any of the other Arab states.  ISIS is good because its Sunni.  But that was before it started slaughtering people in large numbers, enslaving people, and cutting people's heads off on the Internet.  Now it looks bad even to people like the Saudis

We have had an off and on relationship with Turkey.  Turkey would like to be seen as the political and cultural leader of the Arab world.  One way to do this is to be seen as the defender of all things Arab against western encroachment.  And the encroacher in chief is the U.S.  Getting too close to the U.S. is a bad for your image in the Arab world.  Turkey is no friend of the Assad regime.  But when it was deciding who to back against him it had lots of "rebel factions" to choose from.  I think ISIS was on its list of factions worth backing.  I don't think ISIS still is. And Turkey has a large restive Kurdish population.  Turkey has been shedding blood for decades trying to keep these Kurds in line.  So it seemed like a bad idea to do anything nice to the Kurds in Iraq.  But now it doesn't.  Why?  ISIS.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.  All of a sudden the Kurds look down right friendly.

So since I have been bad mouthing what the "experts" have had to say, what do I think is the right thing?  First of all, most of the "right thing" is not stuff that generates "bang bang" footage.  It is the hard slog of diplomacy, of consensus building, of finding common ground, and building long term relationships.  That's what the Obama Administration has been doing and it is paying off.  What was not possible a few months ago is now possible.  And, if we keep our powder dry, even more may be possible in the future.

The key to our success is the bad behavior of ISIS.  The conventional wisdom as demonstrated by the  media is that we are smart and thoughtful and caring and the rest of the world is a bunch of dim witted cretins.  This is in spite of the mountain of evidence of stupidity, ignorance, and cretinous behavior on display within our borders on a daily basis.  We have figured out that the ISIS people are bad people.  The rest of the world is coming around to the same opinion.  Give them a little more time.  And in particular, give the people who live in ISIS controlled territory a little time to figure this out too.

Anbar used to ride high back in the day.  Saddam did a good job taking care of them.  He was a Sunni and they were Sunnis.  Then they ended up on the wrong side of the U.S. invasion.  We backed the Shiite majority.  So they reacted badly.  That put them in close contact with al-Queda in Iraq.  Initially this seemed like a good thing.  But over time the relationship soured and we had the Sunni Awakening.  Then the U.S. left Iraq and al Maliki started putting his boot on the neck of the Sunnis.  So ISIS initially looked pretty good.  But that will not last long.

These is a big problem here.  So far recent history has not presented the Anbar Sunnis with good options.  The key to cracking the ISIS nut is to give them a good non-ISIS option.  The same is true, by the way for the Syrian Sunnis.  So the long term goal is to get to a place where the Sunnis in the territory now controlled by ISIS are well governed.  By this I mean competently governed by local Sunnis.  It is not clear to me how to reach this objective.  But U.S. boots on the ground is nowhere on the path.  Here is a way forward that I can see happening.

Iraq gets partitioned into a Shiite state and a Kurdish state.  Syria gets partitioned into multiple states too.  I see no reason not to create a state consisting of eastern Syria and western Iraq, roughly the territory controlled by ISIS.  If you change the ISIS government for a moderate Sunni government you are home and done.  But what I am suggesting is not possible at the moment.  For various reasons it is critical at this time that the U.S. not support the partitioning of either Syria or Iraq.  So for the moment we need to continue to play the hand we have been dealt.

We need to do this or the Baghdad government will interfere with not facilitate the flow of aid to the Kurds.  Turkey is also informally cooperating with the Kurds but I don't think they are yet ready to go further.  Handled badly they could quickly go backward (a more hostile position toward the Kurds) as could the Iraqis.  Unfortunately this means that a bunch of Syrians and probably a goodly number of Iraqis are going to get killed, wounded, displaced, etc.  There are things that the U.S. could do that could theoretically mitigate the situation.  But those same things could also make things worse, much worse.  And it is important that everyone in the U.S. understand a fundamental truth.  There is a near unanimous belief in the area that we have interfered too much in the region.

We have a large debit balance in Iraq according to Iraqis.  We tend to look at how many Americans died and how much money we spent.  Iraqis tend to look at the fact that we went where we were not invited and then made a big mess.  Iraq was laid waste.  Delicate balances were upset.  Many thousands of Iraqis were killed.  Millions were displaced.  Whether we like it or not al Maliki was seen as "our man in Baghdad".  So we get the blame, whether we deserve it or not, for a lot of his actions.  We have built up some credit here and there in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world.  But we are still deep in the hole.  The best way to be seen as digging the hole deeper is to be seen as either going it alone or going against the wishes of the locals.

We must work through the locals.  We must be seen as assisting the locals in whatever they want to do.  We must be seen as NOT dictating.  Dictating is heavy handed.  The Bush administration gave the region and the world far more heavy handed than it wanted to deal with.  Obama has mitigated some of the damage.  But we are not even back to dead even yet in the region or the world.

The trick is to let events come to us, not the other way around.  Bad behavior by ISIS creates opportunities for us.  If we are seen to be continuing to work through Baghdad and the Kurds and the Turks then many things become possible.  Then we work behind the scenes through the locals.  That means we are limited to actions that the locals are ok with.  Ultimately, that disciplines us in a good way.  It's a frustrating and slow way to work.  It will cause talking heads to continue to heap scorn on President Obama in spite of the successes he achieves.  But it will eventually yield the best results.

Do you think ISIS will continue to misbehave?  So do I.  That will open up more possibilities if we are just patient.  Currently Baghdad is opposed to a partition of Iraq.  Let's see how things look in a year or so.  Currently Baghdad and Turkey and lots of other Arab countries are opposed to an independent Kurdish state.  Let's see how things look in a year or so.  Currently ISIS is in complete control of its territories.  Let's see how things look in a year or so.  If the locals decide that a partition of Iraq is a good idea then we can facilitate that.  But we can't impose either a united Iraq or a partitioned one from the outside.  Continuing to try will result in frustration in the short run and failure in the long run.

I don't know what the state of play is with respect to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. and their funding of extremists.  I mistrust what little coverage of this that I see in the media.  Let's see what the state of play is in a year or so.  Frankly, the U.S. has never pushed the issue of the funding of fundamentalists with any of the Arab states that do it.  That's because oil concerns override everything else.  But what if these states decided on their own that it was time to stop?  Again, good things that are now not possible become possible.  And what if an indigenous Sunni reaction materializes within the ISIS region?  It has happened before with the Sunni Awakening.  Then we have something to work with.  The difference is between trying to bludgeon someone into doing what you want and trying to gently encourage them.  People don't like to be bludgeoned.  They tend to push back even if they know what you are trying to get them to do is a good thing.

The Arab world has been governed very badly for a very long time.  The Arab Spring is a reflection of a realization on the part of the Arab street that this is so.  Getting from bad government to good government via revolution is a very hard thing to pull off.  We tend to focus on the American Revolution where things went well.  But what happens more often looks more like the French Revolution.  One of many bad side effects of that experiment is the Napoleonic Wars.  France did come out the other end eventually.  But it was a very long and painful process for France and for all of Europe.  Both Libya and Egypt seem to share more similarities to the French example than the American one.  And Iraq may follow the French model too.

At this point someone always wants to bring up Ruanda.  There was a large genocide there in the '90s.  The feeling now is that if the west had intervened at the proper moment then the genocide could have been avoided.  And in the case of Ruanda the feeling is probably correct.  But circumstances are always different.  In Ruanda the theory is that all that would have been necessary was for the west to make a lot of noise.  Little or no actual action would have been required.

The U.S. had good intentions in Iraq and it invested a lot of time, money, and people.  It failed anyhow.  We made Iraq a mess.  The one thing people agree on with respect to Syria is that a lot of time, money, and people would be required to make a big difference.  The ISIS territory is surrounded by Arab states.  There is no way to get to it without going through one or more of them.  Any large unilateral effort by the U.S. is doomed to failure.  Not every humanitarian crisis is avoidable.

Since we are doomed to failure without local cooperation why not put local cooperation on the front burner and immediately jettison any idea that sounds like "go it alone"?  I have found it a valuable rule of thumb to ask how much cooperation is actually on offer in these situations?  If the answer is "lots", as it was in Iraq I, then prospects are good.  If the answer is "not much", as it was in Iraq II, then things are very likely to go very wrong.  A few months ago there was very little real cooperation on offer in the region.  There is now a lot more.  By treading carefully and by doing less rather than more the amount of real cooperation on offer looks to keep increasing.  This is definitely a case where being late is much better than being early.

1968

A few years ago an investment index called the VIX was created.  The Volatility Index is a measure of how volatile the stock market is at the moment.  The VIX doesn't measure whether the market is going up or down.  It measures how much it is bouncing around without moving in any one direction.  If their was a VIX that measured how volatile society is at a point in time and if we studied the Social VIX for the twentieth century, 1968 would win hands down.  A hell of a lot happened that year.

I was in college in 1968 and a lot was happening on campus.  But it wasn't just the campus of the school I was attending.  It was true of campuses across the U.S.  It was also true of campuses in many other parts of the world, something I was not really aware of at the time.  And it wasn't just campus volatility, volatility was everywhere.

But that was a long time ago and I had pretty much forgotten about it.  Then I was at a social event and somebody said "boy, there's a lot of stuff going on now".  A friend of mine said "this is nothing compared to 1968".  So that's once.  Then my brother sent me a book called "Postwar" by Tony Judt.  It is a history of Europe after the end of World War II.  It was my first introduction to the student unrest on campuses across Europe, a lot of it in 1968.  That's twice.  And then CNN started running an excellent series called "The '60s", that was produced by Tom Hanks, among others.  One episode was simply and appropriately titled "1968".  That's three times.  I can take a hint.  It's time for a blog post.

Now the approach of the Hanks series was thematic ("The Space Race", "Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll", etc.) rather than a strict chronology.  But 1968 was justifiably singled out.  And in the "1968" episode one of the talking heads was Mark Kurlansky, author of a book simply called "1968".  At that point I just had to get the book and read it.  I am glad I did.  For those who were not around then, or for those who have forgotten, let me review some of the major events of 1968.

1968 came toward the middle of the Vietnam war.  It turns out that U.S. casualties peaked in 1968 at 14,589 U.S. servicemen killed.  The total U.S. deaths for the entire war was just under 60,000 so about 25% of them happened in 1968.  And, to provide even more context, this number is higher than all the 9/11 deaths plus all the U.S. deaths in Iraq plus all the U.S. deaths in Afghanistan added together.  But 1968 marked a turning point in Vietnam for other reasons.  The My Lie massacre happened in 1968.  U.S. soldiers wiped out a Vietnamese village killing over 300 civilians, many of them women and children. But details didn't become broadly known until 1969.  In the mean time something even more important happened.

At the end of January the North Vietnamese launched what was later referred to as the Tet Offensive.  They launched simultaneous attacks across pretty much all of South Vietnam.  One of the most well known attacks (it happened close to a large media presence) was the attack on the U.S. Embassy in what was then called Saigon.  The attack was a failure for the North from a military perspective but it ultimately turned out to be a giant political success.  Up to this point the U.S. approach was "kill bad guys".  The theory was eventually enough of the bad guys would be dead and victory would be ours.  With this in mind, the official line was "we are killing a lot of bad guys so we will achieve victory soon".  But Tet resulted in a large shift in the number of people who believed the official line.  Walter Cronkite, then the most respected name in journalism, went to Vietnam.  Cronkite came back and characterized the situation as "mired in a stalemate".  It took some time but the U.S. strategy shifted from aggressive U.S. military led action to "Vietnam-ization", essentially declaring victory and leaving after turning the war over to the South Vietnamese.  The U.S. military got out, although the CIA stayed.  And, in 1975 the North won.  So, for a number of reasons 1968 was the turning point in terms of the U.S. and the war in Vietnam.

1968 was notable for one particular civil rights event.  Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.  By 1968 the civil rights movement had peaked to some extent.  The movement was very effective in the '50s and early '60s.  The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.  But with the passing of the act the focus moved from the South to the North.  The movement was broadly popular when what we were seeing was vicious white people in authority beating up clean cut black people in the South.  But when the focus moved to blacks getting blue collar jobs historically held by whites and blacks trying to move into traditionally white neighborhoods, as it did when the focus moved from Selma Alabama to Chicago Illinois, then the movement became much less popular.

And the civil rights movement had been successful by employing nonviolent means.  But a new generation of leaders came to the fore who were much more comfortable employing violent means.  So Dr. King was being overshadowed by others like the Black Panthers.  King felt this deeply in the weeks before his death.  An attempted demonstration organized by King to support Memphis garbage workers just before he was killed ended up turning violent.  And, of course, his assassination was a quintessentially violent act.  And the riots that followed the news of his assassination were marked by violence.  So 1968 was important to civil rights but in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary sense.

Kurlansky dates the feminist movement to 1968.  A number of women held a demonstration at the Miss America pageant that got a lot of coverage.  The feminist movement, like many others is often more accurately characterized as a evolution rather than an revolution.  "Sex and the Single Girl" had been published in 1962.  "The Feminine Mystique" had been published in 1963.  The National Organization for Women had been founded in 1966. But none of these events had broken out into the broader public context.  The Miss America demonstration was widely covered in the media and got people talking.  People started talking about bra burning and equal pay.  "What is the proper place for women in society" became a legitimate subject for discussion.  And in 1968 the first woman was allowed to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.  And the first union to represent then Stewardesses now Flight Attendants won major concessions from airlines in 1968.

So in the U.S. you had civil rights, the Vietnam War and Women's rights on the agenda and stirring things up.  (I'm skipping over the Assassination of Bobby Kennedy while he was running for president and lots of other things in the interests of brevity.)  This led to a lot of student unrest on college campuses across the country.  Even if you think the students were crazy it makes some kind of sense that there was a lot of student unrest in the U.S.  But Judt spends a lot of time documenting similar student unrest broadly across Europe.  And Kurlansky talks about student unrest in Mexico, Italy, France, and Germany.  What's going on?

The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were specific to the U.S.  And Kurlansky does a good job of documenting the roots of the women's movement in the civil rights movement.  Women's rights are civil rights and a lot of the early leaders of the women's movement got their early training in the civil rights movement.  So they knew what to do and how to do it because of earlier civil rights experience.  But none of this was true of these other parts of the world.  So what was up with all that?  That's a question I will get back to later.  But for the moment I want to talk about Czechoslovakia.

Another major event in 1968 was the "Prague Spring", named after the capital of Czechoslovakia.  (Czechoslovakia has since been peacefully split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.)  For unique and peculiar reasons an experiment was tried out in Prague in the spring of 1968. Communism is the name of a philosophy developed by Marx and Engels in France in the 1800s.  The first country that was ostensibly governed according to communist principles was the USSR (now Russia) starting in about 1920.  As the father figure of communism, the story goes, the USSR is "first among equals".  But is that really true?  In Prague they ran the experiment.  They did not try to move away from Communism.  They did not try to move away from a close relationship with the USSR.  What they did try was to move toward democracy and a free press.  Now on paper communist countries had always been democratic.  They held elections regularly and had extremely high voter participation.  It just so happened that the communist guy always won.

A long time communist with close ties to the USSR named Dubcek rose to the top spot in Czechoslovakia.  He was a true believer in communism so he didn't want to change that.  He wanted to keep the communist party in charge and use communist principles to guide policy.  But he did not see this as incompatible with a free press and a general relaxation in what was permitted behavior.  But it turned out to be too much for the leaders in the USSR (Brezhnev and Kosygin).  They organized a military invasion from neighboring "east block" countries.  Dubcek lasted the year out but just barely.

This event had lasting consequences.  It exposed the leadership in the USSR as not so much communists as your run of the mill autocratic dictators.  In a clash between maintaining power and communist ideology the call would always be made in favor of power.  This completely destroyed the intellectual underpinning of the communist movement.  It took another 20 years to sweep communism away as a governing philosophy.  But the invasion of Czechoslovakia completely delegitimized communism as a philosophy.  After the invasion any action associated with a "communist" country could only be analyzed in a pure power politics framework.  This is a weakness.  It may not seem to be that big of a weakness.  But countries depend on being seen as acting out of a sense of good will and moral rightness at least some of the time. It was no longer possible to see actions of communist countries in this light and the seemingly small hurts accumulated as a result eventually built up to the point where they became fatal.  Now let me return to the broader picture.

Kurlansky spends considerable effort trying to figure out why "1968" happened in 1968.  He points out the critical role played by the media.  If an event wasn't covered in the media it effectively didn't happen.  The media has a lot of flexibility when it comes to "editorial judgment", deciding what to cover and how much to cover it.  But there is one thing the media can't resist.  In the context of foreign conflicts it goes by the alliterative name of "bang bang" footage.  Footage of people getting beat up, shot, or blown up almost always makes it on the air.  Another way to put it is a phrase often associated with local news coverage:  "if it bleeds, it leads".

Kurlansky describes a telling incident involving a sheriff named Pritchett who presided over a place called Albany, Georgia.  Early in his career King ran an extensive civil rights campaign in the area.  It was a total bust.  It wasn't that bad things weren't happening.  They were.  And it wasn't that King was unable to pull off mass demonstrations resulting an large numbers of arrests.  He was.  But sheriff Pritchett was unfailingly polite and scrupulously avoided violence.  So there was no "bang bang" footage.  There were no pictures of bleeding bodies because no shots were fired and nobody was beat up.  As a result the media stayed away in droves and no one has heard of the Albany Georgia civil rights campaign.

King and other civil rights leaders learned from this experience.  In the future they sought out people like sheriff "Bull" Connor and various other representatives of entrenched power who could be reliably counted on to provide lots of bad behavior for the TV people to put on the nightly news.  In the absence of actual blood and gore it was occasionally acceptable to substitute behavior like that of Governor Wallace when he blocked doorways and proposed "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" as the cameras rolled.  But in terms of explaining why "1968" happened in 1968 this attribute of how news decisions are made actually predated 1968 by quite a bit.  So we must look elsewhere.

Kurlansky attributes it to changes in the technology of how news gets from the scene to the TV screen.  I think he is right in his general thesis but that his details are wrong.  The first thing to note is the intrusion of "TV screen" in the above sentence.  TV news was a very primitive business in the '50s generally resembling those old timey newsreels that used to be shown in movie theaters in the '30s and '40s.  But things improved quickly and by 1968 most people were getting the bulk of their news from TV.  And moving pictures are much more compelling than text or even still pictures.  "bang bang" footage is wonderful at attracting eyeballs, even on a black and white TV.  A TV news broadcast that could routinely show "bang bang" was definitely going to take up most of the "news oxygen" in the room.

Kurlansky talks about two innovations.  One is video tape and the other is satellite transmission.  Let me take each in turn.

The importance of satellite transmission was that it made it possible to move pictures great distances (i.e. from Saigon to New York) quickly.  And by 1968 we were getting a lot of pictures from Vietnam.  But satellite transmission at that time was too primitive to be reliable.  It was only suitable for the odd stunt in the '60s.  Instead I think the actual key innovation for international stories like Vietnam was the jet airplane.  Jet planes are faster, more comfortable, more reliable, and cheaper than propeller planes.  So by 1968 air travel had expanded massively.  With jets you could throw some film or video on a plane and move it great distances quickly.  This made it possible to get moving pictures from Vietnam to New York, the center of the U.S. news universe in 1968, in less than 24 hours.

Another technological innovation, one that was very helpful in covering domestic stories, was "cable".  These were high tech wires that permitted TV signals to be transmitted long distances.  At this time they were far too expensive and persnickety to be used as part of a "cable TV" system, the way we now think of "cable".  But starting in 1956 NBC was technologically able to have its flagship news broadcast feature two anchors, one in New York and the other in Washington DC.  The show switched between anchors as it moved from story to story.  This was just barely possible in 1956.  By 1968 it was possible to use intercity cables to instantaneously ship video to New York from many medium and large cities scattered around the country.  So if a riot happened pretty much anywhere in the country during the day, video from the riot could air on the news on the same day.

Kurlansky's point on video also has to do with increasing flexibility and speeding things up.  Before video news footage was shot on 16 mm black and white film.  The film then had to be developed, printed, and edited.  Both the film stock and the processing were expensive and time consuming.  This caused camera men to be very careful what they shot.  Shooting 15 minutes to get 1 minute of useful film was ok.  Shooting three hours was not.  But video tape was reusable.  If you shot 3 hours and only used a minute you just recycled the rest.  And video was quicker and easier to edit.  So it became possible to shoot a lot more.  This in turn, made it more likely you got the "money" shot.  The thinking changed from "be careful" to "shoot everything".  The problem with this is that video based news cameras did not really become practical until Sony introduced the Betamax in 1975.  But by 1968 studio video equipment was available at TV stations around the country.  Film (now often color film) could be shot, rushed to a nearby TV station, transferred to video, edited, and cabled to New York in hours not days.  The switch to end to end video was not realized until the late '70s but the general speedup of the hybrid system was making an impact by 1968.

Another thing that is well documented in Kurlansky's book is that various groups were learning from each other.  A technique would be pioneered in the civil rights movement.  It would then move to the anti-war movement.  And it would eventually be used by the feminist movement.  In the same way that by the '60s rock 'n roll artists were intimately aware what other musicians were doing, the various protest movements were very aware of what other protest movements were doing.

And there was a cultural thing going on that can be summarized by the phrase "question authority".  I was personally aware of this at the time.  If we look at what this country says it stands for, things like the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Declaration of Independence), "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and out Posterity" (preamble to the U.S. Constitution) , and "all men are created equal" (Declaration of Independence) and then we look at what this country actually does there is often a contradiction.  Segregation and unequal treatment of black people is not consistent with "all men are created equal".  A literal reading of the words is consistent with a "separate but equal" approach to women.  But cultures evolve.  And it is reasonable to evolve "all men are created equal" to "all men and women are created equal".  So our professed beliefs are incompatible with an unequal treatment of women.

The Vietnam war is a more complicated situation.  The Constitution specifically states that Congress, not the President, is the only body that can "declare war".  The work around for this is the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.  Congress passed it.  The executive took it as sufficient authority to prosecute the war.  Legalistic arguments can be made on both sides but that is not the principal bone of contention. At its deepest foundation the basic argument was not the fact of the war but how it was prosecuted.  The U.S. had a much larger industrial base.  It had a much larger population.  It had much better technology.  But we lost anyhow.

Imagine we had gone into Vietnam and won.  Imagine further that the whole thing had taken six months, only cost a billion dollars, and only have cost a few dozen U.S. lives.  Under those circumstances people would have decided it was not worth arguing over.  But none of those "imagine"s were true.  So people carefully examined why we got involved in the first place and found the whole process wanting.  And hanging over it all was the fact that our government did not play straight with us.  If you want more on the subject then check out my "Vietnam" blog post at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html.  But all this called into question the basic "we're the good guys" assumption we have about ourselves.  We meddled in the affairs of a foreign country.  We spent a lot of money.  We got a lot of people killed.  And specifically at My Lie (and probably at a bunch of other times and places) we killed a bunch of women and children.  We lost.  None of that is consistent with the behavior of good guys.

More generally the first couple of decades after World War II were good times.  The economy was growing.  Life was getting better for everyone.  It was getting better faster for some but it seemed to be getting at least a little better for everyone.  And we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.  We had just won the war.  We were having the "baby boom" and as a result investing a lot of money in education.  And we were teaching ourselves about "American" values.  And then there was the cold war.  The commies were the bad guys.  How do we know?  'Cause we do good stuff and they do bad stuff.  And, since it looked like the cold war would be a long and difficult struggle, all this good stuff/bad stuff was taught in our schools.

We were the "all men are created equal" people.  Of course, the commies said they were too but they were lying.  And one way you could tell they were lying is because they built the Iron Curtain and put down uprisings (Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, others) and suppressed free speech.  We, on the other hand, had the two longest open borders in the world (U.S. - Canada and U.S. - Mexico).  We stand for freedom and, if you stand for freedom, you don't need no stinking fences.  (I will pass up the opportunity to discuss the current "build the dang fence" on the U.S. - Mexico border debate here.)  That's what we were taught in school.  And, by the way the communist economic model sucks.  The democratic (never call it "capitalist") economic model is much better.  Just look at all the cars and refrigerators and such.  (In 1959 Richard Nixon, then vice president, literally had a debate on economic systems with Nikita Khrushchev, then "Chairman" of the USSR, at an exhibit in Moscow that featured, among other things, kitchen appliances).

The apparent contradiction between words and actions was very troubling.  But maybe there was a good explanation.  What's the harm in asking?  After all, our core values included free speech and representative government.  And it's a given that we are not oppressed like those people who live under the control of those bad old communists.  So people asked.  And the response in way too many cases was "shut up and sit down, you're bothering me".  Now it might be that it was not the right time or not the right place.  But there was also no good response to "what is the right time?" or "what is the right place?" either.  Certainly some people were willing to discuss these matters.  But for the most part they were the pro-civil rights, anti-war, and pro-women's rights people.  And they were not the people who held the reigns of power.

So, if the good guys were trying to change the system in good ways, how did it all go wrong?  Kurlansky brings a lot to the discussion on this subject.  His basic conclusion is that there was a lot of confusion, incoherence, and a disdain for anything practical.  This was something I did not take much notice of at the time.

As but one of many examples, he talks about the poet Allen Ginsberg.  The 1968 Democratic convention was held in Chicago.  What was later described as a "police riot" broke out and was captured on TV.  Hundreds were beaten or arrested.  Ginsberg was a peaceful soul.  His solution to all the chaos:  have everyone chant "Om".  Needless to say his "solution" was completely ineffective and sounded idiotic to normal people.  And there were innumerable interminable debates, hundreds of marches, hundreds of sit ins.  But in a lot of cases it was hard to figure out exactly what would fix the problem that the debate, march, or sit in was about.  Kurlansky quotes numerous key players as saying "we were making it up as we went along" and "we never did end up deciding what we wanted".  During this period there was a very popular newspaper comic strip called "Li'l Abner".  It was drawn by Al Capp.  Capp coined the acronym SWINE - Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything.  Capp was good at getting at deep truths in what was ostensibly a light hearted comic strip.

So there was a core of goodness and truth involved in the chaos that characterized 1968.  But there was a whole lot of anarchy, irresponsible behavior, and general chaos involved too.  The intensity of it all put a lot of people off.  A lot of people were asking very loudly for a lot of change.  Many people felt simply overwhelmed.  And then there were the people of good will who asked the agents of change "what do you want?"  Too often they got "Om" level impracticality: "all you need is love".  What were these people to conclude except that "the demonstrators have no clue".  For good reasons and bad this generated a backlash and delegitimized liberals.  Nixon ran on a "law and order" platform in 1968 and won.  He then cracked down on anyone he didn't like, dragged the Vietnam War out until 1975, and delivered underwhelming economic results.  He was, however, successfully able to derail the women's movement and put civil rights on the back burner.  He was eventually impeached for Watergate.

The country reacted by then electing the liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter.  But his presidency is generally rated a failure (bad economy, embarrassment in Iran).  Carter was followed after one term by Reagan.  Nixon was more of an opportunist than a doctrinaire conservative.  But Regan was conservative to his bones.  Liberalism has yet to recover from the excesses of the '60s.  But the rate of change has accelerated.  We now get a new iPhone a year.  Gay rights has gone from a "third rail" issue (don't touch it - you'll get electrocuted) to a good "vote getter" issue that politicians are happy to embrace.  Both the first iPhone and the old view of gay rights are only a decade old.  The ability for individuals to access the Internet is now about 2 decades old.  I have an old school car that you start by turning the key in the ignition, just the way you did in 1968 (and before).  Many new cars sense the presence of your key while it is in your pocket.  You literally push a button and go.

What has changed is people's ability to cope with a rapid rate of change.  We now have a lot of experience with everything around us changing all the time.  And it's not just new things like iPhones.  It's old things like cars.  It's gotten so that we now take as a given that news about an event taking place ten thousand miles away is available within seconds on our mobile phone. In 1968 the ability to talk to a friend who lived in another state without having to involve an operator was relatively new.  And the ability to directly connect to a phone located on another continent was only to be found in science fiction movies.  In fact, a movie that was released in 1968, "2001, a Space Odyssey", contained a scene involving what was then called a Picture Phone.  Today we know it as Skype.  And today a Skype call to someone in another country or a "long distance" call to a good chunk of the world does not cost extra.  In 1968 a "long distance" call was quite expensive, running perhaps a dollar a minute or more.

So would people be as put out by the doings of 1968 now?  I think they would.  What we have become used to is technological change.  We take it as a given that bigger, better, faster, gadgets are just around the corner.  And sure, the first time you sit down in a "push button" car, as I did about a year ago, it's disconcerting.  But it takes only a few minutes to learn enough to figure out how to operate it well enough to get where you want to go.  But the changes that gave people the most trouble in 1968 were social changes.  And, although society's opinion of gay rights, a social change if there ever was one, has "come a long way, baby" for most people, there are a lot of people who are extremely put out and want to go back to "the good old days".  And we are still battling over civil rights and women's rights.  And to this day there is a large group of people who are just as strongly of the opinion that "the old ways are the best ways" on both of these subjects now as they ever were.

There aren't as many active agents of chaos as there were in 1968 and that's a good thing.  But I think we have also gotten better at fooling ourselves.  We now are much better at keeping our darker impulses hidden.  And that actually makes those darker impulses harder to deal with.  Rednecks setting police dogs on well behaved black people is pretty out in the open. It's a bad thing and it's pretty obvious it's a bad thing.  Less obvious methods of discrimination can be just as effective in the long run as the more obvious methods of yesteryear.  But they are much harder to deal with because there is no "bang bang" video to shock everybody into action with.         

Dealing with Religious Pests

I just had a pleasant experience dealing with a couple of Mormon "missionaries" who knocked on my door this evening.  It was the second instance within the last few days of someone knocking on my door with a religious message.  The first one was not persistent.  He was willing to take a quick "no" for an answer.  But a feature of modern society is the all too common situation where someone wants to convert you.  And like the Mormons and unlike the other guy it is often hard to get rid of them.  I have been musing for some time on the general subject of religion.  I think I have come up with some original thinking on the subject.  I used my thoughts on the Mormons.  Judging by my success I recommend them to others.  I think they are a useful contribution to the discussion of religion in general.  So I thank the Mormon visitation for giving me an excuse to lay them out.  Even if you don't want to accept them as your own personal belief feel free to trot them out as an aid in dealing with Mormons or other religious types that are bothering you.

What I have come up with is a general argument against most religions.  The beauty of it is that many parts of it do not depend on the specific beliefs of any specific religion.  There is a part that has to be customized to fit a specific religion.  But even that part does not require you to know a lot about whichever specific religion you are dealing with at the moment.  Most people would think that a general argument is a weak argument that can be dodged using something like "my religion does not have that problem".  But, as I will demonstrate, the argument depends on an almost universal attribute of religions.  And any religion that doesn't have that attribute is also the kind of religion that doesn't send people out to pester you.  To see what I am talking about let me sketch out the bare bones of the argument.

1. A religion is created by God to achieve a purpose.
2. That purpose is behavior modification.  The objective of the religion is to increase the amount of "good" behavior and/or decrease the amount of "bad" behavior relative to the amount that would occur in the absence of the existence of God's religion.
3. God is "all knowing" or, at least, very smart.
4. Your religion (here's where we get specific) does a poor job of achieving its objective and is therefore false.  It is not the true religion.

I think your response now is "interesting, but what's the point".  It turns out that the point is a very powerful one.  But first let's examine each of these ideas in more detail and ask ourselves if religionists can object.  And right off there is an obvious objection.  What if there is no God?  I'm an Atheist so I actually believe there is no God.  But people who approach you and ask "Have you heard the word about Jesus?"  (or a variation appropriate to their religious beliefs) all believe in God.  They may not believe in a Christian God but the whole point of their religion is that they believe in a specific God.  You could argue with them that there is no God or that their God does not exist but another one does but this is an argument they are prepared for.  You get better results by bypassing the issue entirely.

Another objection is that there are some religions that are not behavior modification oriented.  Good for them.  But none of the adherents of these religions accost you as you are going about your daily life.  So I am going to ignore these religions.  All of the popular western religions and many eastern ones definitely fall into the "behavior modification" category.  They all have rules for "right behavior" and "wrong behavior".  The details change as to what behaviors fall into the "right", "wrong", and "theologically unimportant" categories.  But these are details we can ignore for the moment.  Each religion gets to do its own categorization.  With these two general observations out of the way let me proceed to the specifics.

I think most religious people would find it reasonable to say that their religion originates with God.  It may be that a religion was created by an inspired individual.  But this is more about the details of how the religion God has created are transmitted to us mortals than it is about where the tenets of the religion originate.  Surely God is competent enough to make sure that the inspired individual does a good job.  So we can again ignore the details.  It doesn't matter how the religion got created or how it got transmitted.,  The key is that it is God's creation. 

And if a specific religion is not God's creation why are we supposed to buy into it?  If religion A is God's creation and religion B is not why do we want to have anything to do with religion B?  Religions inevitably contradict each other.  If they didn't they would be the same religion.  In the areas where the two religions agree there is no advantage to paying attention to the "B" position.  And in the areas where they disagree we are risking engaging in bad behavior by going with B.  And, by the way, most religions agree that God only created one religion so all the other religions are wrong to a greater or lesser extent.

So we have a specific religion namely the religion of the person in front of us.  Adherents are usually uncomfortable characterizing the objective of their religion as behavior modification.  But assume for a moment that the overriding objective of their religion was not behavior modification.  Then what's the point of all the rules?  You are supposed to believe certain things.  You are supposed to act in a certain way.  Why?  If it is entirely ok to reject the beliefs and it is ok to act inappropriately then the belief system and the rules are unimportant.  If this is so then adhering to the tenets of that religion is unimportant.  If this is so then shouldn't we go looking for an important religion?

Now the religion gets to set the level of importance associated with any specific belief or action.  It can say that this belief is of major importance and that that act is of minor importance.  Again, they get to set the rules.  But it is important that the religion ascribe some importance to some beliefs.  And it is important that the religion ascribe some importance to members increasing the amount of "good" actions that its members take and/or decreasing the amount of "bad" actions that its members take.  And we can ignore beliefs and actions where the behavior is the same in the absence of the religion and focus on the cases where the religion changes behavior.  Religions are supposed to be important.  If the point is to make minor and trivial modifications to people's behavior then the benefit is not in line with the effort.  The religion is fatally flawed.

Most religions characterize their God as "all powerful" or "all knowing" or at least more powerful and/or important than other Gods.  That's the "religion" perspective.  Most religions also believe that their God created the world around us,  For contrast let us adopt the "science" perspective for a moment so we can do a thought experiment.  Imagine asking a scientist, any scientist, the following:

Assume for a moment that the parts of the world that you study were created by some outside entity.  Now, given what you know about how the parts of the world that you study, how smart do you think that outside entity is?

I think all or nearly all scientists would answer "extremely smart".  So religious people and scientific people would agree that what religious people call God is extremely smart.  So again our premises seems pretty much self evident.

The final point is where the disagreement should set in.  Proponents of most religions believe their particular religion is pretty wonderful.  But now you have changed the source of the disagreement away from its usual ground.  I have found that the people that want to talk religion with me are pretty dogmatic.  They have a script and they want to stay on script.  There are a number of objections that they are prepared to deal with but they are pretty much at sea when confronted with anything else.  In these situations where they have not prepared they tend to go to one of a small number of rote generic responses that usually don't address the objective you have raised.

But in response you just bring them back to the basics.  "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that God created your religion?"  "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that your religion has a purpose?"  "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that your religion is about behavior modification?"  "Are you disagreeing with the fact that your God is all knowing or at least very smart?"  They will try to fight you on the "behavior modification" part.  But it is pretty much impossible for them to have any problems with the others.  And, assuming you deal successfully with the "behavior modification" push back they are pretty much stuck.  So let me spend a moment on the behavior modification issue.

They don't like to admit it but it is easy to box them in.  Religions have beliefs their members are expected to subscribe to.  "Do you believe in God?"  "Do you believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God?"  "Do you believe Jesus died on the cross to wash away original sin?"  "Do you believe that the angel Maroni visited Joseph Smith?"  Religions have actions their members are expected to take and actions their members are expected to avoid.  "Do you believe you are supposed to be baptized?"  "Do you believe you are supposed to go to church once a week?"  "Do you believe you are supposed to tithe?"

The beliefs and actions are specific to the specific religion.  And you have to have at least a modest knowledge of the specific religion to come up with appropriate examples.  But in all fairness believers really can't get away from the behavior modification aspect of their religion.  So what they usually do is change the subject.  But just circle back.  Repeat the belief or action and invite them to deny the truth of your contention.  They really can't get away from it.  Now they may challenge some specific contention.  And they may be right.  If so then admit you got that specific contention wrong and move on to another.  But only do this if they make a credible objection.

Once the "behavior modification" issue is disposed of we are on the "how effective is your religion" issue.  This is not an issue any of them is prepared for.  And theoretically they have a response along the lines of "very effective".  But it is usually easy to find a way to counter this.  No religion has secured a majority of the world's population as adherents.  In fact, if we drill down to the various major and especially minor branches of any specific religion less than one percent of the world population are followers.  Many religions (Southern Baptists, Mormons, modern mega-churches) are very modern.  They date back less than 200 years.  Christianity dates back only two thousand years and Judaism perhaps 3,000.  That means that most of the people who live or have lived on this earth missed the boat.  That sounds like pretty inferior work.

Now we can dive into the specific tenants of the specific religion.  Where is the evidence that adherents actually believe what they are supposed to believe or do what they are supposed to do?  A classic example of this is Catholics and birth control.  The official position of the Catholic Church is that birth control as a no-no.  But something like 90% of Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives.  My point is NOT that Catholics are hypocrites.  It is that the Catholic Church is poor at getting their own believers to adhere to their own teachings.  The general argument is "the church is inefficient".  You have to tailor the specifics of the inefficiency to the specifics of the church you are dealing with.   Once you have come up with reasons why a specific church is inefficient your can return to the general argument.  Is inefficiency a mark of smart designer?  A third rate engineer would toss a design this obviously defective into the trash and go back to the drawing board.  So your church is fatally deficient.

Religious types will try to distract you at this point.  My Mormon guys started talking about "perfection".  My response was that your church gets to decide how important or achievable perfection is.  The point is not whether this or that is or could be perfect.  The important point is how effective is the Mormon church in modifying behavior appropriately in response to their belief on perfection, whatever that belief is.

The question shifts from "what should the goal be" to "how good at achieving the goal is a particular religion".  The religion is free to set whatever goal they want except that the goal must be one that people would not move toward in the absence of the religion in question.  (If the goal is to "get people to do what they would otherwise do" then the goal has no value.)  But once the goal is set the important question becomes how effective the religion is at modifying behavior in the appropriate directions.  If they are bad at it then their religion is not legitimate.  God would have done a better job.

Most of what these people want to talk about is "what should the goal be".  Your answer is "the goal should be whatever your religion says it should be".  In other words, whatever they want to talk about is not in contention.  You concede it immediately.  Then you pivot to the question of "how effective is your religion at achieving the goal your religion has set".  The answer is usually that they are not very effective.  And, by the way, you immediately concede the usual "good versus evil" questions.  Whatever their particular religion decides is ok.  But you pivot to the question of how effective is their religion at increasing the good stuff and decreasing the evil stuff.

One of the standard arguments my Mormons trotted out on me was "how can you question our religion if you don't know all the details of our religious beliefs".  At this point you are supposed to accept a copy of "The Book of Mormon" from them and study it carefully.  I was initially unsuccessful in dealing with this argument.  I pointed out that there were many thousands of religions and asked if I was supposed to be familiar with all of them.  They dodged this question and went back to repeating their original argument.  But they could see that they weren't getting anywhere so they left.  But that conceded the argument to me.  "How can you argue that I should be familiar with your religious beliefs if you are unwilling to become familiar with mine?"  They are hypocrites.  I did give them points for neatness as they crossed the street in search of an easier mark.

I do actually believe my own argument.  I believe believers believe that their religious beliefs are "the word of God".  And I agree with them that if some entity created the world around us (they believe the entity is their God, I don't) then that entity was really smart.  But all the religions I know anything about seem dumb to me.  And I see no indication that leads me to believe that there is some religion out there I don't know about that is not dumb.  So I have a hard time believing that an entity that was as smart as the hypothetical "creator" would create or even support any of the "religions" I am familiar with.

I go even farther than that.  I don't know why such a hypothetical "creator" would actually care about what religions say it cares about.  Why would it care whether or not we congregate in a building of a specific shape once every seven days?  Why would it care whether or not we utter certain incantations?  Why would it care whether we treat each other badly?  And what would its definition of "badly" be?  Why would it confer a favor on one person in one situation and not another?  And why would it have an interest in assisting one specific group in slaughtering another specific group?

But some religions at some times have said we should congregate in cruciform churches every Sunday.  And religions say we should pray (and some religions at some times even tell us what language we should pray in as if God is incapable of translating).  And religions promise that prayers will be answered sometimes but they can't tell us which prayers will be answered and why or why not.  And most religions say "thou shall not kill" but then give us a long list of exceptions for when we are encouraged to kill (or let people the religion disapproves of die).  And as long as we have had written history we have had documented instances of army after army marching out on the field of battle each accompanied by its own set of religious figures who swear that "God is on our side".  This might make a small amount of sense if on a particular battlefield the various religious figures represented different religions.  Then you could argue that it was "God against God and may the best God win".  But in all too many cases we don't even have that fig leaf.  All the various religious representatives represent the same religion and, to hear them tell it, each can simultaneously authoritatively deliver the undivided affections of the same God but each to a different army.       

Negotiation

There is a lot in the news on the international front just at this moment.  A civilian airliner has been shot down over Ukraine and the Israelis have invaded Gaza.  I try to take a longer view in these posts so the specifics of either of these events is not my primary focus.  But I was already thinking about both areas when I started thinking about the subject at hand.

These two currently red hot hotspots join a much longer list of merely hot hotspots.  There is Syria, which merits two entries.  There is the "chemical weapons" entry and the "ongoing civil war" entry.  Iraq is breaking wide open.  There is the "what to do about al Maliki" issue, the ISIS "Sunni eruption" issue (which can be linked to the "Syria civil war" entry), and the "what to do about the Kurds" issue.  Iran too gets two entries; one for the "nuclear" negotiations and one for its participation in Syria/ISIS (and possibly Palestine support, which is related to the Gaza invasion issue).  Then there is Afghanistan, which has just completed disputed elections and is the object of some sort of a U.S. military withdrawal.  There are other hotspots on the International front but I think we now have a list that is plenty long enough.

One could find a number of commonalities in this list but the one I want to focus on is "negotiations".  A hotspot will flare up and immediately someone, and frequently several some ones, will immediately call for negotiations.  In more long run crises the periodic hew and cry for "negotiations" is a standard feature of their evolution.

The idea is simple:  "jaw jaw is better than kill kill".  If people are talking they are not shooting and if they are not shooting people are not dying.  That's the theory anyhow.  But negotiations don't seem to have a very good track record.  The current Gaza situation is a classic example.  I am going to skip the long and complicated history here and focus on just focus on the events of the last few days.  Israel started bombing Gaza and threatened an invasion.  The U.S. immediately popped up and made loud "negotiations" noises.  Egypt jumped on the U.S. bandwagon and came up with a deal that the Israelis accepted.  But then Hamas balked and the "deal" never happened.  At a more micro level both sides agreed to a "5 hour" cease fire but the terms were widely violated.  And at this hour the Israeli military is rooting around on the ground in Gaza.  This is a particularly depressing example of negotiations failing but it is far from unique.  What's going on here?

Several hundred years ago white settlers "negotiated" a sale of Manhattan Island from the local Indians for chump change.  This is an example of a negotiation that went badly wrong for one side.  But since then most people have gotten wise to how negotiation works.  So you can still find situations where one side or the other gets taken to the cleaner but this now rarely happens.  The art of negotiation has been an area of serious study for many decades now.  You can read books or get degrees in how to conduct negotiations.  So the chance of someone pulling off a coup against the other guys is very small these days.  And the situation is actually worse.  People have been "horse trading" for millennia.  It is easy to find examples of disadvantaged people who do fine in a negotiation.  Somehow or other they turn out to be to be good at it.

This was driven home to me many decades ago.  It is another lesson from the U.S. experience in Vietnam.  On one side you had smart sophisticated Americans.  The U.S. team was led by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.  Before becoming Defense Secretary he had been President of Ford Motor Company.  There he had cut his teeth negotiating with auto unions.  So he knew a thing or two about negotiation.  On the other side you had the North Vietnamese.  North Vietnam was half of a third world country, for God sakes.  On paper they stood no chance.  The whole thing should have been a repeat of the Indians and the Dutch in Manhattan.  But it wasn't.  The North Vietnamese more than held their own at every stage of the years long negotiations.  Beyond that I learned that negotiations don't get anywhere until both parties want them to get somewhere.  The North Vietnamese in particular thought that they could win by continuing to do what they were doing outside the setting of the negotiations.  This resulted in a comic situation.  It took over two years to decide what the shape of the negotiating table would be.  Would it be round, where all parties would be on an equal footing or would it be square so each party would have its own side.  (It's been so long now I don't member what the final outcome was.)

My take away from this is that negotiations can't get you anywhere until all sides actually want to come to an agreement.  Part and parcel of this is that what each side wants must be what the other parties are willing to let them have.  The Vietnam negotiations did eventually come to a successful resolution.  The North Vietnamese wanted the U.S. out of Vietnam and a negotiated "settlement" as a necessary condition for that to happen.  The U.S. wanted to "declare victory and leave".  A "successful" negotiation gave them the fig leaf they needed to pull this off.  The other parties involved were too weak to affect the outcome.  Ultimately, the North Vietnamese were right.  Continuing to do what they were already doing eventually led to them winning the war.  The U.S. had concluded but couldn't publicly say that the war effort was doomed to failure.  The South Vietnamese held on long enough so that the U.S. could pretend that the U.S. withdrawal and the takeover of all of Vietnam by the North Vietnamese were two separate events. So in a "cut your losses" sense, the negotiations were ultimately a success for the U.S. too.

This left me with the belief that negotiations don't settle anything until the parties are ready for them to be settled.  I expect negotiations to fail whenever I think that the underlying positions are still in conflict.  If there is a formula then the parties can find it quickly.  If there is no formula then nothing will come of negotiations.  Having depressed you with a situation where the U.S. fared badly let me talk about a situation where things went surprisingly well.  This is the whole "chemical weapons in Syria" issue.

It has long been known that Syria had large stockpiles of relatively modern chemical weapons and the military means to use them.  When the whole Syrian revolution went hot a lot of people became seriously concerned.  The concern was justified.  At some point the Assad regime started actually using them.  Previously President Obama had drawn a "red line" around the use of chemical weapons in Syria.  The first evidence seemed to be pretty much small bore.  Obama tried to hand wave this away in the reasonable belief that if he had to do something he didn't have any good options.  This resulted in some criticism but it wasn't just the President that saw no good options.  Then Assad launched a chemical attack that was big enough it couldn't practically be ignored.  That put the fat in the fire.

Then, as Obama is weighing his many bad options, the idea was floated to do a deal where the weapons would be taken out of Syria and destroyed.  In a remarkably short time a deal was struck and all of the known chemical weapons have since been removed from Syria.  Any doubt about how good this news was got dispelled when ISIS declared a caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq.  Assad rates high on the "bad guy"-o-meter.  But ISIS rates an eleven.  The world is a better place now that we don't have to worry about ISIS getting its hands on chemical weapons.  It seems very likely that they would use them aggressively.  Saddam used them in Iraq against the Kurds not that long ago in the same part of the world.  So it is a very good thing that the weapons are gone.  And it appears negotiations played a key role in making that happen.  And that's true.  But, having set up the background I want to talk about why they succeeded this time.

Chemical weapons were first used on a large scale in World War I.  But the WWI experience taught two lessons:  In the right circumstances they can kill a lot of people and they are very hard to control.  So the "right circumstances" are much harder to come by when you most need them.  Immediately after the end of the war various efforts were made to ban them.  And they were not used to any extent in World War II.  Now various horrific techniques were used:  torpedoing of neutral ships, bombing of largely civilian targets (London, Berlin, Tokyo), extermination camps, firebombing, drone attacks, rocket attacks, and the Atomic Bomb.  The case can be made that chemical weapons are no more horrific than these other techniques that were used.  So why not use them too?  The reason is this whole "control" thing.  It is hard to make sure the large scale use of chemical weapons kills the bad guys without killing the good guys.  All these other techniques could be much more easily controlled.

The modern fear industry does not talk about this when discussing chemical weapons.  It would interfere with their ability to make us afraid of whatever they want us to be afraid of today.  But the people involved in the negotiations were aware of this disadvantage.  Both the U.S. and Russia saw advantage in being on the side of eliminating them.  Assad was put under pressure from the Russians.  But he also saw that he could be equally effective militarily without chemical weapons.  And the other tools in his military toolbox did not carry the heavy propaganda cost of using chemical weapons.  So he did not put up that much of a fight when the Russians pressured him.  And ultimately everyone (Assad, the rebels, the U.S., the Russians, other less important players) cooperated to get the weapons removed under horrific wartime conditions.

Here we had a deal that everyone could sign on to and that everyone saw some personal benefit in being a party to it.  Once all the parties figured this out the deal came together very quickly and has since been carried out.  With this perspective in mind let me run down the list and see how things fit (or don't) in these other situations.

Ukraine - The Ukrainians have suffered from a spate of bad governments in the post-Soviet era.  This resulted in Putin seeing an opportunity and engineering the annexation of the Crimea to Russia. Having succeeded there Putin fomented unrest in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, which contain large numbers of people who are culturally Russian.  Incompetence and disorganization on the part of the current Ukrainian government contributed to a belief that he would be successful here too.  But this annexation has not been going as smoothly as the Crimean one did.  And now we have the latest event where a Malaysian civilian jetliner was shot down over the disputed territories.  Over, above, around, and through all this have been various calls for negotiations.  The official U.S. position on the "unrest" in eastern Ukraine is a call for negotiations between the current government of Ukraine, Russia, and possibly others.

I believe it is too soon to expect anything.  But we may be close to the time to sit down and start taking.  The Ukrainian government seems to be quickly getting its act together.  The "rebels" started out with a lot of support from the local population and even more support from Russia.  But they have played their hand badly.  I see the Russian role as opportunist.  Putin styles himself as a great Russian nationalist who is a champion of Russian interests.  Annexing Crimea was a success because it was cheap in terms of both blood and treasure and was well received (for the most part) by the population involved.  It definitely advanced the interests of Greater Russia - we are powerful and successful and we are the champion of Russian people wherever they are.  But Ukraine is turning out to be a much more expensive proposition.

The Ukrainian government, after a number of early stumbles has started reacting effectively.  And the shooting down of the airliner is a giant black eye.  Russia has long been seen as a bully by its neighbors during the Putin era.  Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and now especially the airliner shoot down feed that narrative.  And if Russia is ultimately unsuccessful in annexing eastern Ukraine that is a blow to the whole "Greater Russia" narrative.  It's not even necessary for the effort to fail.  It is only necessary for important interests in Russia to decide it is likely to fail or to be too expensive,  As a basically opportunist endeavor Russia will want a graceful exit as soon as they decide the whole thing is a bad idea.  In the same way that the U.S. objectives changed in the Vietnam negotiations the Russian objectives will change in the eastern Ukraine negotiations.  At that point successful negotiations become possible.  I don't think we are there now but I think we could be soon.

Gaza - Here I expect failure into the foreseeable future.  Hamas still thinks it can outlast Israel.  For political reasons within the Arab world Hamas receives enough support so that they have the luxury of continuing to hold that position.  Israel believes it is confronted with an existential crisis.  They believe that if Hamas wins then Israel will cease to exist.  These are incompatible positions.  They have been firmly held on the Israeli side since the country came into existence in the late '40s.  And the position has been supported by one Palestinian faction or another over the same period of time.  That faction has always been powerful enough to veto any Palestinian peace initiative.  Until this changes negotiations are doomed.  I don't see this changing any time soon.

Syria - I have discussed the chemical weapons situation.  Let me move on to the civil war.  Here both sides see themselves in an existential situation.  Until that changes I see no hope for negotiations.  But unlike the Israeli/Palestinian situation, where nothing material has changed in decades, the Syrian situation is in flux.  ISIS has a strong potential for upending the playing field.  I believe that ISIS has a real possibility of creating a country consisting of eastern Syria and western Iraq.  The current boundaries were drawn up by the British and French at the end of World War I.  Then make no geographic or cultural sense.  ISIS may cause some of those boundaries to be redrawn along lines that make much more sense geographically and culturally.  The big barrier to ISIS success that I see is the question of whether ISIS can actually govern.  This is hard to predict.  But if they actually turn out to know how to govern then I think they have a real chance of creating a country.  Whether it is a caliphate or not is a minor consideration.  And its politics might not be what the west and the U.S. will prefer but that won't stop it from happening.  Frankly, I don't know what the cultural map of Syria looks like if you slice the Sunni east out.  So I don't know how an ISIS success will affect Syria.  But there is too much in flux for negotiations to be worth the trouble at this time.

Iraq - Here I think my crystal ball is clearer.  I think Iraq in its current form is doomed.  The three main factions in Iraq are Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd.  The Kurds have already signaled where they stand.  They want their own country.  The al Maliki government in Bagdad is too weak to stand in their way.  Considering the alternatives the outside world may decide that an independent Kurdistan is better than the alternatives.  It is up to the Shiites in Iraq to decide how important it is to do something about ISIS.  I think the U.S. will have little influence on that decision.  There is talk about replacing al Maliki with someone else.  That was tried by the U.S. in South Vietnam.  It didn't work then.  I don't think it will work now especially given that no competitor has emerged so far.  I think that the Shiites are stuck with al Maliki.  One possible outcome is that the Shiites in Iraq will unite with the Shiites in Iran.  I think this is an interesting possibility but unlikely.  The Iraqi Shiites are Arabs.  The Iranian Shiites are Persian.  The Arabs and the Persians have been fighting for several millennia.  I so no reason to believe it will stop any time soon.  So what I see is a Shiite Iraq, a Sunni caliphate (for lack of a better term), and a Kurd Kurdistan.  I think all this will happen relatively soon but not right now.  So right now negotiations are a waste of time.

Iran - I have already covered the Iraq/Syria/ISIS issue.  Let me move on to the nuclear negotiations.  The "deadline" for talks to conclude has just been extended.  This is a less than shocking development.  Nuclear weapons share some similarities with chemical weapons.  They are not that controllable.  Sure, you can explode one exactly where you want.  But they tend to be too big.  And they are a propaganda disaster.  The only benefit seems to be the prestige angle.  "I am a big bad nuclear power who has to be accorded due respect."  But several countries including Brazil and South Africa have decided they are more trouble than they are worth.  Everybody assumes Israel has nuclear weapons but officially they won't admit it.  Where's the prestige in being a nuclear power if you don't brag about being a nuclear power?  And other countries seem to be willing to go after Israel anyway.  So the prestige looks vastly overrated.  Then there is North Korea.  They are a nuclear power and everybody knows it.  But they are still seen as a pipsqueak country.  So North Korea represents another blow to the prestige argument.

What Iran says is that they want to be a nuclear power in the sense that they process nuclear fuel.  Their official position is that they don't want a bomb.  Some people think they are telling the truth about this and some people think they are lying.  But either way it represents the basis for a deal.  The U.S. and other western powers said they didn't want Iran processing nuclear fuel at all.  But all the international treaties say it is OK for Iran to process fuel.  The deal consists of Iran not making a bomb in exchange for Iran being allowed to have a heavily monitored nuclear fuel industry.  I think that's a feasible deal.  And I think there is enough prestige in being a fuel processor to make up for what ever prestige they miss out on by not being a nuclear power.  So Iran gets the prestige they want.  On the other side Iran gets to do what treaties already say it can do, namely process nuclear fuel.  But that nuclear fuel industry ends up being heavily monitored.  In short I think there is a deal to be had here.  But there is also the art of the deal.

A deal must be sold to both sides.  Going in each side promises its supporters that it will come away with more than it actually gets in the end.  This has to be dealt with.  The standard method is "we got as much as we could and the deal we got is better than no deal".  The specifics of the deal (in this case the prestige for Iran of being a nuclear processor balanced against the fact that they are a heavily monitored one) is what you use to manage the second problem.  The standard technique for handling the first problem is brinksmanship.  First, you set up a "hard deadline".  Then you go past the deadline.  Then you reach a middle of the night deal after the deadline.  It may be ugly but it works.  I think there will be an Iranian nuclear deal along the lines outlined above.  I think it is a "win/win" all around.  But the western public has been promised that the Iranian nuclear capability will be wiped away completely and the Iranian public has been promised that the Iranian government will not be pushed around by the "running dog" west.  Most Iranians probably don't want Iran to be a nuclear power but they also don't want their government to cave to the west.  By going to the last minute and beyond each side can credibly argue that they got the best deal they could get.  Without the drama and brinksmanship the argument is much harder to make.  So I predict more brinksmanship but ultimately a deal.

Afghanistan - If I had my way the U.S. would be completely out of Afghanistan.  Iraq is falling apart because the fissions in its society keep growing and there was no opposing force to shrink them.  We have much the same situation in Afghanistan.  The Northern Alliance represents Pashtuns but not the other components of Afghan society.  There is rampant corruption coupled with bad government.  This results in a classic "the center is not holding" situation.  We need to get out of the way and let the Afghans sort this out.  They need to figure out how to do this on their own.  Otherwise they will never build the strong institutions necessary for long term success.

Then there is Pakistan.  Pakistan has subsisted on blackmail from various foreign powers since it came into existence when the British relinquished control of India in the late '40s.  The U.S., the Chinese, the Russians, the Saudis, and others have been pouring money into Pakistan at various times for various geostrategic reasons.  Currently the U.S.'s reason is that Pakistan squats on the supply lifeline to our troops in Afghanistan.  If we have no troops there then we have no reason to continue to pay the blackmail.  Getting all of our troops out of Afghanistan gives us a much better position vis a vis Pakistan.

Getting all of our troops out of Afghanistan cleanly may not be possible.  But our leverage in Afghanistan is weak.  If we can do something about making sure the election was not rigged then so much the better.  But that's about it.  We should tread very carefully with respect to any commitment beyond the end of 2014.

Finally, let me return to the whole "talking is always better than fighting" argument for why negotiations are supposedly always a good idea.  There is a cost to full tilt negotiation.  You lean on one or both sides to try to lever concessions out of them.  If the negotiations ultimately fail there is a cost associated with this kind of power diplomacy.  We may have pressured one side into a concession that is no longer worth it after negotiations fail.  But the concession may stay hung around their necks anyhow.  And countries do not like to be leaned on any more than people do.  They resent it.  So strictly "going through the motions" calls for negotiations are probably OK because the costs are low and in line with the benefits ("we are pro-peace types").  But the kind of negotiations the U.S. has engaged in between Israel and Palestine have been full bore enough so that the costs of the ultimate failure may be significant.

I have very little good to say about George W. Bush.  But I think he made the correct decision to not push hard for Israeli/Palestinian peace.  It was not in the cards then.  I don't think it is in the cards now.  I salute George Mitchell and John Kerry for trying.  But I think it is important that these efforts be realistic.  If there is a deal to be had, great.  Charge ahead full steam.  But if the deal is not really there make sure that your efforts are not counterproductive.

Of course none of this will in any way diminish the vast volumes of hot air that will continue to be expended on why negotiations should be forced into existence immediately and everywhere.  Nor will it diminish the micro-criticism of the people engaged in or not engaged in any particular set of negotiations.  But hopefully this piece will make us all more informed spectators.  

Tech bubble 2.0

If you follow the stock market closely there has recently been talk about a new "tech bubble".  In layman's terms this means that some analysts are floating the idea that the prices of tech stocks are overvalued (too high) and that we are about due for a correction (sharp drop in prices).  This is entirely normal.  Conventional wisdom says that if the market goes in the same direction for three to five years it becomes time for the trend to switch direction.  Since stocks have been going up since the market bottomed in early 2009 it is time for them to start going down.  Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much talk of the general market correcting, just tech stocks.  And at this point it is just a few voices.  So what's with this "bubble" thing?

In 1841 (over a hundred and fifty years ago for those who are keeping track) Charles Mackay wrote a book called "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds".  The book is so influential you can buy it new from Amazon to this day.  In that book Mackay popularized the term bubble to describe situations where large numbers of people pay extraordinary prices for things.  The most famous (and to the modern sensibility ridiculous) example from this book is Tulip bulbs.  But the events Mackey relates actually happened.  The "bubble" of prices inflated and inflated and inflated.  And it ultimately popped just like a soap bubble.

Mackay examines a number of other bubbles (and several other delusions not related to investment or finance).  It is an interesting book and I recommend it.  And investment mavens have been reading it and recommending it to other investment mavens for as long as the book has been in print.  And, of course, bubbles have come into existence and popped many times since Mackay's book came out.  That's why each generation of savvy investors keeps reading the book and keeps trying to be on the lookout for bubbles so they won't get caught when they pop.  They, and I include myself in this particular "they", have had limited success.  Why?  It's hard, man.  Let's look at "tech bubble 1.0" to see what I mean.

The modern era where the stock market pretty much seems to go up, except for the odd correction lasting at most a few months, is abnormal.  Let me contrast it with another abnormal period where pretty much the opposite happened.  On February 9, 1966 the Dow closed at 995.15.  The economy looked good so people expected the Dow to "break 1000" for the first time in history within a day or so.  It didn't.  Instead that turned out to be the high for the year.  The Dow see-sawed around and eventually broke 1000, and 1100, and 1200, and 1300.  But each of those milestones were accompanied by lots of ups and downs and took many years.  Then the Dow started to go down.  Eventually the Dow bottomed at 776.92 on August 12, 1982.  Over a 15 year period the Dow had dropped over 20%.  By this time there was a lot of pessimism to mirror the optimism that had surrounded the 1966 high.

We now know the Dow turned the next day.  And it proceeded to shoot up.  Wall Street was very happy.  But as the market kept going up they started worrying.  And guess what?  On October 19, 1987, roughly five years later, the market crashed.  The crash was big enough and scary enough that the day was nicknamed "Black Monday".  But the market quickly turned back up only to crash, but less spectacularly exactly a year later.  And again it recovered quickly, climbed past its old all time highs and just kept going.  For the most part it is still going today.

At about the time of the 1982 bottom a bunch of brokerage firms got together and decided it was time to modernize.  The New York Stock Exchange had a trading floor, literally a room where people stood around yelling at each other and filling out pieces of paper.  You had to literally be on the floor to buy or sell a stock.  They decided that these new fangled things called computers could replace the trading floor.  Then people could buy and sell stocks from anywhere.  This exchange started going by the acronym NASDAQ (National Association of Security Dealers Automated Quoting system).

The PC was introduced at about the same time and quickly became popular.  And people quickly started forming corporations to cash in on the popularity of PCs.  Back then these were small companies so they ended up on the NASDAQ.  In those days the Dow was made up of big companies that listed on the NYSE so the Dow was a proxy for how NYSE stocks were doing.  Stock indexes are a good marketing took so the NASDAQ put together one of their own.  And the NASDAQ Index was made up of stocks that traded on the NASDAQ exchange.  So it had a lot of those small computer companies in it.  And those small computer companies did very well.  They did well in business but their stock prices did even better.  So the NASDAQ Index shot up.  On March 10, 2000 it closed at 5048.62.  That turned out to be the all time high.

Bubbles are usually caused by or aggravated by insiders. The economic crash of 2008 is a classic example.  The key players were all Wall Street types or were aided and abetted by Wall Street types.  Another classic book is "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by Edwin Lefevre.  This book is nominally fiction but it lays out real schemes used by operators to manipulate the prices of stocks and other commodities.  You had to be an insider or be allowed to work through insiders to be able to pull off the schemes described in the book.  "Reminiscences" was published in 1923, years before the crash of '29.  But this book is another example of how old this type of behavior is.  The technical details of the schemes change but the basic principals don't.

Anyhow, the stock prices of a wide range of tech companies spiraled up and up and up.  Normally a close examination of the market would reveal the fingerprints of various operators in or closely associated with Wall Street.  But not this time.  What was going on was very simple.  Small investors loved these computer related tech stocks.  So they bought them.  Wall Street's initial reaction was "yippee - more suckers to fleece".  So they would get into these stocks with the intention of riding them up to the top then dumping them before the suckers caught on.  But a funny thing happened.  These stocks did not seem to have a top.  They kept going up and up and up.  Smart money on Wall Street kept missing out on further price increases.

This behavior feeds on itself (see "Extraordinary").  People see other people making tons of money by riding these tech stocks.  In the early days some of these stocks (Apple, Microsoft, others) were a "good" investment.  They showed an ability to make money then make more money.  But a lot of these stocks didn't seem to have any kind of plan for eventually turning a profit.  And their stocks went up right alongside the "good" tech stocks.  Wall Street was completely flummoxed.  They eventually figured you that you bought tech stocks no matter how bad their business plan was because if you closed your eyes and just bought you made tons of money.

So the market went up and up and up.  By the late '90s it was primarily powered by these NASDAQ tech stocks.  During this period the NASDAQ Index rose much more than the Dow did.  The Wall Street smart money was completely confused.  And I was right there with the Wall Street people.  And that's the thing.  You could find stories coming out by the bushel basket all through the late '90s.  They all said the same thing:  "tech stocks are in a bubble.  The bubble is going to burst any day now".  The problem is that if you followed this eminently sensible advice you lost out on the opportunity to make a lot of money.  So everyone got swept along, even the smart money.  The problem was that everybody knew the bubble was eventually going to burst.  But every smart prediction of when this would happen turned out to be wrong.  The bubble just kept growing and growing.  All you could do was fasten your seatbelt and hang on.

Eventually the bubble burst in 2000, about 5 years after most people (me, most of Wall Street) thought it should.  All the major Indexes, not just the NASDAQ, dropped sharply.  And all of them except the NASDAQ eventually recovered.  The Dow surpassed its all time record from this period years ago.  The S&P 500 (considered the best of the major indexes by most professionals) also recovered and moved on to record territory years ago.  But not the NASDAQ.  Currently it is more than 500 points off it's 2000 all time record.  This is in spite of the fact that its pattern of ups and downs has been broadly similar to the Dow and S&P once it bottomed after the 2000 crash.  It went so high then that it has not been able to get back there since.

And that brings me back to the current situation with tech stocks.  A lot of them went under after the 2000 crash.  The remaining ones recovered generally along the lines of the broader market.  They crashed in 2008 and have since recovered, again generally along the lines of the broader market.  But they have been doing rather well in the last few years.  The 3-5 year cycle says they are about due for a correction.  So will they?  I think not but I could be wrong.

Let me spend a little time comparing the current situation with the one in 2000.   In 2000 there were lots of tech companies that lacked the usual fundamentals companies are traditionally rated on.  Wall Street likes growth and these companies were growing at spectacular rates when measured by their customer base.  But in a lot of cases these customers were not generating revenue.  And, as a result, profits were nonexistent.  In fact many of these companies were running up big losses.  This was not necessarily a bad thing.  The old saw goes "you have to spend money to make money".  Often it is necessary to make a big up front investment in order to generate big profits later.  Railroads must spend a lot of money laying track in order to later make a profit on passengers and freight.  But these companies were spending a lot of money creating large customer bases but they had no idea how to "monetize" their customer base (get money out of them).

These companies said "we'll figure that part out later" but many of them never did.  They ended up being washed away in the crash of 2000.  What was left behind were the companies that had revenue streams and, in many cases, actual profits. And new companies came along.  An example of a new company was Amazon.  The business model for Amazon was "sell stuff".  They started with books but quickly branched into other areas.  Wall Street could understand the Amazon business model.  In the specific case of Amazon, Wall Street has always been unhappy.  Wall Street wants Amazon to have a higher profit margin but a lot of the general public is ok with Amazon's thin margins and resulting small profits.  And Amazon has been able to maintain a high growth rate so Amazon's stock has done well.

But Amazon turns out to be atypical of the new generation of tech companies.  Companies like Twitter and Facebook have gone with a different business model:  advertising.  Most of the post 2000 tech companies have gone down this road.  Attract a lot of eyeballs and then put ads in front of those eyeballs.  There has been a little of the previous cycle's "trust me" going on.  But it has been "trust me - we will figure out how to pull in lots of ad revenue".  Investors trusted the companies and they have generally delivered on the promise of lots of ad revenue.

But that brings me to the bubble I am actually concerned about and that's the ad revenue bubble.  The trend of increasing ad revenue actually goes back a hundred years or so.  Back in the day the ways you spent money on advertising were billboards and other signage, newspapers, and magazines.  Then radio came along in the '30s.  The "soap opera" type of show was actually created to sell soap products on the radio.  The radio advertising model transitioned to TV in the '50s.  Initially there were the "big three" TV networks, who reached into the home through local affiliates.  Then cable came along and we had all those "cable only" channels.  There are now hundreds of them.

Advertising agencies were not a big deal until radio came along.  Before then the dealt mostly with magazine advertisements.  But radio opened up new markets and gave advertisers the opportunity to spend a lot more money.   Then TV came along and even more money could be spent.  Production costs for radio ads were modest.  Lots of money could be spent to make a TV spot.  Then lots more money could be spent buying ad time on the Superbowl.  The need for more and more elaborate ads got even greater with the advent of hundreds of cable channels.  An ad really had to stand out or nobody would notice it.

In the beginning a billboard or sign could last years.  Newspaper ads could be pretty basic and thus pretty inexpensive to put together.  With radio production costs started to spiral.  And TV and later cable just accelerated the spiral of production and distribution costs.  The percentage of their overall budgets that the typical company dedicates to advertising and marketing keeps going up and up.  And now, of course, we have the Internet.  For the most part the old channels haven't gone away.  There are still billboards and other signage, still radio channels, still TV channels, still cable channels.  As a new channel opens up the percentage of advertising and marketing dollars devoted to the old channels goes down but in most cases that absolute amount doesn't.  Mostly what we see is new dollars going into the new channel.  And that is true with the Internet.  Some of the money comes from cutting back elsewhere but a lot of it is new money.

And there is a fundamental truth about advertising.  The point where on balance new advertising was generating new sales was reached decades ago.  We are all subjected to ads for more goods and services than we can possibly purchase.  This has been true for decades.  And we have gone from ten times oversaturation to a hundred times to a thousand times or more.  At best an advertisement diverts us from purchasing one thing in order to purchase something different.  Or an ad causes us to keep purchasing something rather than switching to purchasing something else.

What has been going on for decades now is an ad war.  On one side we keep putting up better defenses to advertisements while on the other side advertisers keep coming up with techniques for breaching those defenses.  There is a novelty factor.  I remember when they started running ads along with the trailers (actually just ads for other movies) that run before the movie starts in a movie theater.  I am sure that when this started those early ads were effective.  They were coming at us from a new direction.  The same is true for the early internet ads.  We had not yet built up our defenses against ads coming from this direction.  But it doesn't take long.  Then marketers have to come up with even more intrusive methods for getting in our face.

It was recently disclosed that Facebook did an extensive study (without telling any of the victims) of just what the tolerance levels of Facebook users were.  I use a number of news web sites.  They have all slowed down?  Why?  Because various delays are now built in while the extensive ad content loads.  The page you want to view does not come up until all the add content is in place.  Another trick they now use is to run a video (with an ad on the front) automatically whether you want to see the video or not.  I tried switching to other news sites.  But they all deal with the same ad agencies who all force them to use the same intrusive ad infrastructure.  The latest advertising frontier is smartphones.  But all the rules that work for web sites work equally well for smartphone screens.  It is simply a matter of tweaking the technology to be smartphone compatible.  I believe that particular technology problem has already been solved.  Amazon has just released a "fire" smartphone that has been optimized to meet Amazon marketing needs.

In summary, the current business model for tech companies is to generate sufficient ad revenues to meet profit targets.  This depends on there being enough ad revenues to support whatever new company is coming down the pike.  But the market for ads has been massively oversaturated for decades.  Companies must dedicate more money to advertising and marketing in spite of the fact that the effectiveness of these expenditures keeps diminishing.  We are all bombarded with vastly more advertising than we can use.  We are in a situation similar to the cold war when the question was "is nuking Moscow ten times over enough or should we plan on nuking it fifteen times over".  Once the first bomb has gone off the marginal value of subsequent explosions is pretty much nil.

As in the case with tech companies in the '90s where the bubble went on far longer than it should have, the ad bubble has already gone on far longer than it should have.  And we have already established that I am a lousy predictor in these situations.  So I can't predict when the ad bubble will burst.  My guess is that the advertising bubble will keep inflating for a while longer.  So I will restrict myself to the prediction that the cause of the bursting of the current tech bubble will be the bursting of the ad bubble and leave it at that.