Bizarro World

It is a common refrain these days that liberals and conservatives live in different worlds.  These two segments of our population often have "polar opposite" views about what is true.  Both sides say about the other "for them up is down, black is white, and true is false".  I want to talk about a specific instance where this scenario is what's playing out.  Liberals and conservatives now see key events in Ukraine so differently that there is almost no commonality.

One way to characterize this situation is to make reference to "Bizarro World".  Most people get the reference even though it dates back to before a lot of us (but not me) were born.  You see, Bizarro World is a comic book invention.  More specifically, it comes from the fantasy world Superman occupies in what we now call "the DC Universe".

The "DC" stands for Detective Comics, an early comic book line from a company with a boring name.  Times change and Detective Comics got short handed to DC and the company decided to rename itself.  Today, most people are familiar with the DC "universe" and the Marvel "universe", for instance.  Dedicated fans can lay out the parameters of one of these fantasy worlds in obsessive detail.  But even the most casual observer knows that Superman and Batman anchor the DC universe.  And it is to the elaborate fantasy world DC built around Superman in the '60s to which we owe the invention of Bizarro World.

Turning out an issue a month in a dozen or so lines of comics is exhausting.  You quickly burn through all the variations on idea after idea after idea.  The desperation born out of this crushing reality spawned Bizarro World.  The code that governs this world is "us do opposite of all Earthly things.  Us hate beauty!  Us love ugliness!  Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World".  In a word, change up to down, black to white, true to false, etc., and see if you can come up with a fun story to put into a comic book.

The DC writers had great success with this.  They created an anti-Earth that was cube shaped instead of spherical.  They populated it with an anti-Superman, and so on.  It was a success in that it spawned a whole bunch of stories that could be used to fill up a whole bunch of pages of comic book after comic book.  And it was very popular with readers.

As a result of this sustained popularity "Bizarro" and "Bizarro World" became concepts that became a regular part of popular culture.  People who would not be caught dead within a mile of a comic book or a comic book store knew what the terms meant.

And that's where we stand with some fundamental assumptions about Ukraine now.  Both sides now see the other side as pushing a Bizarro World narrative on the subject.  But before I go into that I want to explore the question:  is a Bizarro World even possible?  Sure, it works in a comic book.  There the author can hide any problems and dodge around any inconsistencies.  The readers suspend disbelief and go along with it if the story and the situation are fun.  But what about the real world?

Let's start with a real world example that was explored fictionally about a hundred and fifty years ago, the "Looking-Glass" world.  In 1871 Lewis Carol published a sequel to his wildly popular "Alice in Wonderland" called "Alice through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There".   The launching point for the story was the observation that if you look through a mirror, the less pretentions word we now use instead of "Looking-Glass", then we see a Bizarro world.  Behind the Looking-Glass what is on the right in the real world becomes on the left and vice versa.

Lewis started with that idea, posited that Alice could somehow enter this world by stepping through the Looking-Glass, and went on from there.  The world residing on the other side of the Looking-Glass looks pretty much like the real world.  But that world often contains doors.  What is beyond the door we see in the in the Looking-Glass World?  Carol posited that a quite bizarre world might be found there, just beyond what we could see from the real world.  And that's what most of the book concerns itself with.  And it does so in a very delightful manner.

Confining ourselves, for the moment, to what we can observe of the Looking-Glass world from the real world, we can make some observations about the rules that govern that specific Bizarro World.  Not everything is different.  In the part we can see, left and right are switched but up stays up, down stays down, and near and far stay near and far.  In other words, there is only the one change.

That's true, at least, of the parts of the Looking-Glass World that we can observe.  In theory it is possible that the parts that extend beyond the parts we can observe can have many additional differences.  We can't see there and, unlike Alice, we can't go there, so we have no way of finding out.  Carol's ability to invent many entertaining additional differences and place them in that terra incognita is what makes the book fun.

But the Looking-Glass World is fictitious.  Are there Bizarro Worlds that actually exist?  The answer turns out to be yes!  Imagine a short video of two pucks caroming off of each other on an air hockey table.  The red puck comes in from the left.  The white puck comes in from the right.  They collide in the middle and each recoils back the way it came.  Imagine watching this video.  Now ask yourself this:  is the video being run forwards or backwards?

It turns out you can't tell.  That's because the basic physics on display is "time invariant".  The laws work the same whether time runs forward from the past to the future or runs backward from the future to the past.

This is known in physics as the "time's arrow" problem.  Which way does time's arrow point and can we prove it?  And in most situations with most of the law of physics, the answer is no.  You can't tell which direction time flows in.  The laws of physics are exactly the same regardless of which way time's arrow points.

So we have a Bizarro World situation.  With respect to time's arrow we can't tell whether we are in the "real" world where time's arrow points from the past to the future, or the Bizarro World where time's arrow points from the future to the past.  But it turns out that there is a solution to this particular problem.

Imagine you have a big glass jar and two equal sized bags of jelly beans.  One bag is full of red jelly beans and the other bag is full of black ones.  Now pour first the red then the black bag into the jar.  At this point you will have a layer of red beans on the bottom and a layer of black ones on top of it.  Now stir the jar up.  Soon all the beans will be mixed together.

If you make a video of all this it will be obvious which way the video is running when you later play it back.  If layers of red and black beans merge into a mix the video is being run forward.  If a mix of beans resolves itself into a layer of red and a layer of black, the video is being run backwards.  What's going on here is something called entropy.

Entropy is a measure of chaos.  In general, as time passes in a forward direction the universe moves from a state of low entropy (everything is ordered) to a state of higher entropy (everything is chaotic).  The jar with two layers of beans is more ordered.  The jar with everything stirred together is more chaotic.

Now science has a whole scheme for measuring order and chaos and for calculating the amount of entropy a system contains.  But the details are complicated so I am going to skip over them.  I will note, however, that once the beans are mixed up you can keep stirring the jar as long as you want.  The beans are not going to settle out into layers no matter how long you continue to stir.

Returning to our air hockey table.  If we widen our shot and shoot video for longer we will eventually be able to figure out which way the tape is running.  If the pucks start out going quickly and, after bouncing around for a while, slow down and eventually stop then the tape is running forward.

If the pucks start out not moving but then start moving and then go faster and faster as the tape plays then it is running backwards.  Air hockey tables are low friction devices.  But they still have some friction.  And friction is an entropy increasing phenomenon.  So entropy measurements tell us which way time's arrow points.

Similarly, we have all kinds of particles and anti-particles.  If we replace particles with anti-particles and watch what happens it turns out the same thing happens as would happen if they were particles.  The laws of physics work the same for particles and anti-particles.  We can't tell a set of particles interacting among themselves from a set of anti-particles interacting among themselves.  So which is real and which is Bizarro?

As far is physicists can tell, there's no way to tell.  What they can say is that what we think of as the "real" universe is 99+% made of particles and contains only small trace amounts of anti-particles.  If a particle meets its anti-particle they both get changed into a nothing but lot of energy.  So if you have an "electron" and you want to know whether its a particle (electron) or an anti-particle (positron), try to hit it with something you know for sure is an electron.  If they avoid each other the "electron" actually is an electron.  If both particles get replaced by a flash of energy then it was a positron.

But deciding that what, for the most part, makes up the mater in our universe is particles and not anti-particles is a convenient but arbitrary decision.  Scientific observations tell us that it's almost all the same class of stuff.  Physics does not tell us which class of stuff it is.  If everything switched to the other class we wouldn't notice anything different.  We chose to call the situation we are familiar with the "real" version and a hypothetical situation where everything got switched the Bizarro version.  But there is no factual basis for this choice, only convenience.

Here is what at first appears to be a similar situation.  Benjamin Franklin figured out that electricity came in two opposite flavors.  Like particles and anti-particles, opposites attract and annihilate each other.  Each kind on its own is repelled by more of that same kind.  With nothing to go on, Franklin picked one kind at random and decided it was "positive" electricity and, therefore, the other kind was "negative" electricity.  But, now that we know more, we know that Franklin got it wrong.

In many circumstances electricity acts like a fluid.  And in most cases that fluid is composed of electrons, negatively charged particles.  So it is natural to think of electricity as flowing from positive to negative.  But in almost all cases, what is actually flowing, is flowing from negative to positive.

With electricity there is a way to tell which is the normal direction of flow and which is the Bizarro direction.  And Franklin chose the Bizarro one.  Engineers and scientists have long since figured all this out.  Sometimes it makes a difference and they make the appropriate adjustment.  Sometimes it doesn't and they just get on with it.

I wanted to run through a number of actual examples of "real world" versus "Bizarro World" in order to highlight something that is true of all Bizarro Worlds that can actually exist.  In each case going back to the Looking-Glass one, there is a specific rule as to how you do the "reverse" necessary to switch from "real" to "Bizarro".  But, what is even more important, sometime you can tell which is the real world that actually exists and which is the Bizarro one that is only make believe.

In the Looking-Glass World you switch left with right but leave everything else the same.  In "time's arrow" case, most of the time you can't tell which direction time is flowing.  But you can if you observe a system's entropy.  Pretty much everything else stays the same.

In the particle - anti-particle case, all the quantum attributes of the "particle" have to be flipped so that a particle anti-particle collision results in everything being converted to pure energy.  That means that for any attribute like spin, that can't be converted to energy, the particle and anti-particle must have exactly opposite amounts of that attribute.  Both particles can have a positive amont of mass because mass can be converted to energy.

If we look at the Bizarro World of the comic books we quickly see that those worlds are not actually possible.  Suspension of disbelief is necessary.  For instance, it turns out that gravity on Bizarro World works pretty much they way it does in the real world.  And that means that a cubical planet the same size as Earth is not possible.  But it still make for a fun story.  With that as background, let's move on to Ukraine.

Here's a quick history of Ukraine.  For a long time Ukraine was one of the "republics" that made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.  When it came to U. N. seats, they were each an independent country.  But Russia ran the whole show so, for the most part, they were a single country.

Then the USSR fell part into it s constituent pieces in about 1990.  At that point Ukraine became an independent country in actuality, and not just when it was convenient for the Russians to pretend it was.  But, as part of its history, Ukraine inherited a bunch of nuclear power reactors, four of which were located at Chernobyl.  One of them blew up and made a big mess.  The others are still running.

Ukraine also inherited a bunch of nuclear bombs.  In a complicated dance orchestrated with the help of Russia and the US, these were disposed of and Ukraine became a non-nuclear power.  For a few years Ukraine was able to operate relatively autonomously.  It was the Ukrainians who, on their own, decided that they wanted to denuclearize.

But about ten years ago Putin decided he wanted more influence on (and control of) how things worked there.  So he managed to get his puppets installed into all the top Ukrainian government positions.  The government was extremely corrupt because it was to Putin's advantage that it be corrupt.

Starting in 2013 the Ukrainians revolted and eventually managed to toss the Putin toadies out.  But this left a fragile country behind.  And initially only the top of the government changed.  That left a corrupt, incompetent, and inefficient bureaucracy still in chare of day to day operations.  The Ukrainian populous wanted the corruption cleaned up but this was hard to do due to its pervasiveness.  But efforts were begun immediately.

And almost immediately the Russians staged a military operation that changed control of a peninsula called Crimea from Ukrainian authority to Russian authority.  The Russians invested only a modest amount of effort in pretending that this was anything other than a simple power grab.  But nobody was well positioned to do much about it.  Sanctions were imposed but that was it.

Shortly after that, the Russians also invaded two eastern province of Ukraine.  Again, only a modest effort was made to disguise the fact that this was a straight forward power grab by the Russians.  Again, nobody was in a position to do much about it except ramp the sanctions up a couple of notches.  Putin would very much like all the sanctions lifted.

So, starting in 2014 and continuing ever since, Ukraine has been involved in a war with Russia.  It is very much a "hot" war.  People in uniforms with serious military hardware are shooting at each other.  The number of soldiers on each side is modest compared to some other wars.  But it is very much a big deal as far as the Ukrainians are concerned.

At the same time Ukraine has been trying to get their act together and root out corruption.  A key figure in this latter campaign has been Viktor Shokin.  His job was to root out corruption and prosecute it.  But instead he was wildly ineffective.  He was seen as protecting key figures involved in corruption rather than going after him.  He was finally booted out and replaced by someone who has been doing a much better job.

Ukraine has had two elections since 2013, a remarkable feat given what has been going on there.  Even more remarkably, both have been widely seen as fair.  The 2019 election put Volodymyr Zelensky into power.  He has a background in show business and promised to accelerate efforts to deal with corruption.  He got 73% of the vote.  One reason for his popularity was that he was seen as being outside the traditional power structure.  Voters believed his outsider status would make it easier to deal effectively with corruption.

So that's how Ukraine got to where it now is.  Meanwhile, in the US there was a consensus about Ukraine.  Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the pre-2013 situation was bad.  Both Democrats and Republicans saluted the ouster of the Putin supported regime in 2014.  Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Russian behavior in Ukraine must not be tolerated.

So various sanctions were imposed on Russia in an attempt to punish them.  These sanctions received bipartisan support.  Both parties saluted the ouster of Shokin.  Both parties have been broadly supportive of both military and economic aid to Ukraine.  For a long thime this consensus held.

But over the last couple of years that consensus has broken down.  What has changed is that Donald Trump is now President.  And Donald Trump is unabashedly pro-Russia in general and pro-Putin in particular.  He has worked assiduously to get the sanctions imposed on Russia as a results of their actions against Ukraine removed.  This has necessitated a rethinking of the whole Ukraine situation.

Here is the current official line from the Trump Administration:

1. Shokin was not doing an incompetent job and actually interfering with attempts to root out corruption.  Instead, he was an effective corruption fighter who has been smeared.  A part of the successful smear was perpetrated by then Vice President Joe Biden.  He was helped by his son, Hunter, who was working in Ukraine at the time.
2. The current government has been insufficiently aggressive at going after corruption and needs to be goaded into doing more by any means necessary.
3. In 2016 there was a group operating in Ukraine that successfully implemented a disinformation campaign.  They were the ones responsible for the hacking of DNC mail servers and other foreign election interference.  But they succeeded in fooling people into believing it was the Russians.  The Russians were totally innocent of any wrongdoing.
4. The Ukrainian government should quickly come to some kind of agreement with the Russians.  The agreement would cede territory that Russia has expropriated and end the war.  The agreement should not require the Russians to accept any blame or otherwise be stigmatized.
5. As a result of the previous item it makes complete sense to remove all of the sanctions placed on Russia, Russian government officials, and Putin associates.  The sanctions would no longer serve any useful purpose.

Most of this represents a clean break with previous Republican thinking on the subject.  Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers saluted the ouster of Shokin at the time.  Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers supported imposing all of the Ukraine-related sanctions currently in place against Russia.  Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been supportive of Ukrainian efforts to root out corruption.  But that represents past GOP thinking and does not represent current GOP thinking in the Trump era.

It represents a Bizarro World when compared to either current Democratic thinking or past Republican thinking on the subject.  So who's living in a Bizarro World, Democrats or Republicans?  As my examples above showed, sometimes you can tell and sometimes you can't.  This is a case where you can tell which is real and which is Bizarro.

The way you do this is to carefully determine what is known and what is knowable.  And if we do that, the current Republican position quickly falls apart.  When it comes to corruption "follow the money" almost always works.

Paul Manafort (now in prison for various Federal offenses and likely to be convicted in State court for more) worked in Ukraine up to 2013.  He ended up making a lot of money supporting the old corrupt regime.  Anyone like Shokin, who was closely aligned with the old regime, should be viewed with suspicion.  Joe Biden was conspicuously living a modest lifestyle and still does.  And there is no evidence of any big stash of cash around.  Roughly the same thing seems to be true with respect to his son, Hunter.

Before Trump came into office there was a consensus that Shokin was a bad dude.  No evidence has surfaces since to indicate that was wrong.  Instead there is substantial evidence that the corruption situation has improved noticeably since then.  Is it as good as people would like?  No, but the current Ukrainian government is the first to admit that.

The DNC mail serves were hacked.  The DNC hired a company called Crowdstrike to figure out who did it.  They provided substantial evidence that it was the Russians.  The US intelligence community agreed.  As do others who have looked into this.

The Mueller Report provided substantial additional evidence of Russian efforts directed at the 2016 election.  No one has found any credible evidence of any Ukrainian based efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.  Instead this is a conspiracy theory found in the dark recesses of the Internet.  The originators of this theory are long on rhetoric and short on checkable evidence.

The Russian military has engaged in two different actions aimed at Ukraine.  The first one resulted in Russia taking complete control of Crimea.  The second action is still ongoing and the conflict area is currently characterized as an active war zone.  Russia has provided no credible justification for either action.  It is clear that Russia has grabbed territory from Ukraine by force because it could.  The Russians are the bad guys.

Since then they have taken no action that would justify the reduction of any sanctions.  Yet the Trump Administration has removed sanctions from one of Putin's pet Oligarchs.  The Trump Administration has provided no justification for this move.  They did it because they could.  (Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, have refused to override Trump vetoes that would have reversed this and other pro-Russian moves the Trump Administration has made.)

The Trump Administration has made many moves aimed at eliminating various Ukraine related sanctions on Russia, Putin, and his associates.  For the most part, it has been a bridge too far for congressional Republicans to go along with removing them.  So, most of them remain in place.

Let me finish by reviewing the real situation, the one espoused by Democrats:

1. Shokin was a bad guy who was enabling corruption rather than fighting it.  The Biden's were right to do what they could to help get him kicked out.  They did not benefit, financially or otherwise, from that action.
2. The current Ukrainian Administration has been trying to do what it can to reduce corruption.  They are being opposed by internal forces within Ukraine who benefit from the corruption.  They are also being vigorously opposed by Putin.  Rather than being helpful, the Trump administration is muddying the waters.  Under the guise of corruption reduction (a subject the Administration has shown no interest in in any other country) the Trump Administration has been actively hindering Ukrainian efforts to reduce corruption.
3. The Administration has done this by holding Shokin up as a hero when he is actually a villian.
4. The Administration has also done this by holding up aid because (a) the Europeans aren't contributing enough and/or (b) claiming the Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts are misdirected.  They should be aimed at the Biden family rather than where they are currently aimed.
5. The Administration also believes that a proper investigation would turn up the Ukrainian based plot to disrupt the 2106 US election.  But this has been competently investigated before and no credible evidence of a Ukrainian based plot has surfaced.  Believing in this plot also requires ignoring the vast amount of data pointing to Russia instead of Ukraine.  [The following additional text was added on 10/8/2019]  And the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report saying, in effect, that "the Russians did it".  The report was approved along bipartisan lines.  It was issued by the Republican majority and endorsed by the Democratic minority.  In a second report issued after this post was initially published they came to the identical conclusion.  This report was also issued in the same bipartisan manner.  The first report outlined the case for Russian meddling.  The second report focused on Russian efforts channeled through social media.  [End of added material]  
6. Even if you believe in the Ukrainian plot to disrupt the 2016 US election (which you should not) then the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still ongoing.  So there is still no reason to relax the sanctions.  They should instead be strengthened.

In summary, the Bizarro World created to justify Trump Administration actions with respect to Ukraine is even less credible than the Bizarro World comic book writers dreamed up in the '60s.  And they weren't looking for a scenario that anyone would believe was real.  All they wanted to do was to come up with a story that was a fun fantasy to indulge in.

But Trump and his Republican supporters are deadly serious.  They want their supporters to believe that what they have come up with is actually true.  (They also want their supporters to believe several other Bizarro Worlds are real.)  Unfortunately, unlike comic book readers of the '60s who knew it was all a fantasy, far too many of his supporters can no longer tell where fantasy ends and reality begins.

[Note:  Additional text was added on 10/9/2019 to item 5 of "the real situation" listed above.  No material was changed or deleted.]

Drone Wars

This post is about a paradigm shift in how wars are fought.  But first, what's a "paradigm shift"?

The term was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in a book he wrote called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".  The book was published in 1962 and quickly became hugely influential.

His subject was Scientific Revolutions, major shifts in the way scientists think about a large and important subject.  His thesis was that in many cases there is a slow evolution in scientific thinking.  But every once in a while there is a major change that happens very quickly.  He called these latter events paradigm shifts.  And that was what he chose to focus on.

Kuhn started out as a physicist but his interests gradually changed into an exploration of how scientists know what they know.  He gradually became a social scientist.  And at the time social scientists in large numbers had come around to an idea called "cultural relativism".  This evolved out of anthropology but especially the work of Margaret Mead.

At the turn of the twentieth century social scientists believed in a "natural" and universal morality.  "Right and wrong" were universal and it was universally understood that certain things were inherently "right" and other things were inherently "wrong" from a moral point of view.  And the universal right and wrong closely followed what we would now call Victorian sensibilities.

But a couple of decades into the twentieth century Mead went out and studied what were then called "primitive societies".  And especially when it came to sex, their views on morality differed radically from Victorian thinkers.  Morality was relative and was heavily influenced by the norms of a particular culture.  And those norms differed widely from culture to culture.  And it wasn't just sex.  But I am going to leave it there in the interests of brevity.

Social scientists started doing "anthropological" studies of European cultures.  And they found that the way culture influenced morality in "advanced societies" was exactly the same as it was with the south sea islanders Mead had studied.  A lot of morality is indeed relative.  From there they leapt to the conclusion that all morality was relative.

And the social sciences suffer from a kind of envy of the so called "hard" sciences.  The two primary hard sciences are Chemistry and Physics.  In the hard sciences there is black and white when it comes to determining what is true and what is false.  Lots of people run lots of experiments and pretty much all of them come to the conclusion that "this is true" and "that is false".  Other sciences envied the ability of the hard sciences to definitively establish truth.  Social sciences endeavored to do the same but they kept falling short.

A specific social science experiment could come to a definitive result.  But then someone else would run the same experiment, or a similar one, and get a different result.  No one looks to Political Science, for instance, for the laws you need to follow to achieve a specific election result.  But a Civil Engineer can use physics to design a bridge.  And that bridge can be counted to hold up under a long life of heavy use.  Sociology, Anthropology, and other "soft" sciences, although not being as unreliable as Political Science, found they all had a "reliability" problem.

Eventually, they decided that the problem was not with their tools and analysis.  Instead there was a fundamental problem.  All "truth" is relative.  It inevitably has a cultural component.  There is no such thing as "absolute truth".  This solved the "softness" of the social sciences.  The "hard" science people were wrong.  There was no such thing as absolute truth.

This idea definitely made people in the social sciences feel good about themselves and their various fields.  They could now spin endless amounts of "analysis" in their technical journals.  Since "everything is relative" nobody could absolutely prove that the conclusions any specific article came to were wrong.  It became extremely easy to play the "publish or perish" game and win.  Everybody's a winner.

So how does all this relate to Kuhn and his book?  The book can be divided into two parts. In the first part he analyzes several situations in which scientific thinking undergoes a radical change over a short period of time.

He was able to find and analyze several of these "paradigm shifts".  And his analysis of and conclusions from these various situations were uncontroversial.  The people in the subject areas he covered agreed that what he had to say about these situations closely paralleled their understanding of what had happened.

The problem arose in the second part of the book.  Kuhn argued there that the old paradigm got some things right and other things wrong.  No problem so far.  But then he argued that the new paradigm got some things right and other things wrong.  What changed, he argued, were the mere details concerning what a specific paradigm got right and wrong.

All paradigms were the same in that they got some things right and other things wrong.  The paradigm shift, he argued, was driven by cultural changes within the scientific community rather than some inherent superiority that new paradigm possessed.  The paradigm shift did not make things better, just different.

Unlike the first part of the book, this was very controversial.  Kuhn did himself no good by failing to provide specifics.  If his thesis was correct then he should have easily been able to find things the old paradigm got right that the new paradigm now got wrong.  He provided nothing along these lines.  It wasn't necessary to do so, according to cultural relativism.  "It's just a given that truth is relative".

Hard science people like myself were incensed.  But social scientists liked this result.  And the general public, who read the book in large numbers, didn't understand what the fuss was all about.  The first (and larger) part of the book was fine so the second part must be okay too.  And social scientists muddied the waters by vociferously leaping to Kuhn's defense.

Eventually everybody moved on.  And slowly and grudgingly social scientists have retreated from universal cultural relativity.  Hard scientists continued to rack up results that proved to be robust when incorporated into everyday life.  Social scientists, with no check on even the most outlandish ideas, found their arguments sounding more and more esoteric and ridiculous.  This has resulted in a retreat.  The retreat is most notable in the "repeatability" backlash.

In the last few years several attempts have been made to repeat "foundational" studies in the social sciences.  And it turns out the results frequently come out substantially differently the second time around.  These results have caused more and more people to call for the repeating of more experiments.

Funding organizations have been reluctant in the past to underwrite the cost of redoing experiments where there is no evidence of fraud or incompetence.  But the reluctance has been diminishing as the very interesting results of attempting to repeat old "gold standard" experiments have come out.

And this, in turn, has resulted in a concerted effort to understand what is going on.  Why are so many of these experiments not repeatable?  And this has resulted in an effort to understand how to design and execute experiments that do result in repeatable results.

With that, let's get back on track.  Kuhn did establish the concept of a paradigm shift when it comes to the physical (hard) sciences.  And it turns out that the same idea applies to military strategy and tactics.  Let me give you a few examples.

An early example is the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.  In this battle "knights in shining armor" were handily dispatched in large numbers by English Yeomen wielding longbows.  It turned out that the English Longbow was powerful enough to drive an arrow completely through the armor of the day.  It took a while but this marked the beginning of the end of the armored knight's ability to dominate a battlefield.  Strategy and tactics had to adapt to the new paradigm.

Another example was the American Civil War.  In the decades leading up to the War the rifled musket was introduced and slowly became more and more widely available.  By the start of the War almost all of the soldiers on both sides were equipped with rifled muskets.  Only a few carried "smoothbore" muskets.

The rifling caused the musket ball to spin after it left the barrel of the gun.  That, in turn, caused it to fly straight for longer distances.  In the smoothbore era armies needed to get within about a hundred yards of each other before musketry became accurate enough to be dangerous.

With both types of musket the rate of fire was typically about a shot per minute.  That was slow enough that soldiers facing smoothbore muskets had enough time to charge a hundred yards across a field and get in among the enemy.  Some would be killed or wounded during the charge across the field, but not enough of them would be killed or wounded to blunt the force of the charge.

So a standard tactic for a long time was to line all your soldiers up.  You would then march them to within a hundred yards of the other army's soldiers, also lined up.  Then you would charge.  With a little luck, and hopefully superior numbers, your army had a better than average chance of carrying the day.

Rifled muskets, however, were accurate out to about three hundred yards.  If one army marched their soldiers up to about a hundred yards away the other army could cut them to pieces before they could even start to charge.  If one army charged from three hundred yards away then the soldiers in the other army could fire enough times before the two armies closed to decimate the charging army.  As a result the idea of lining up the two armies on an open field became a recipe of suicide.

Confederate General Lee was the first to figure all this out.  Instead of lining his soldiers up he placed them in cover, behind trees, behind a wall, in a trench or a "fox hole", and had them wait to be attacked across an open area by the northern army  From there his soldiers would pot away at the fully exposed northern soldiers while staying mostly under cover where they were hard to hit.  With their rifled muskets this tactic allowed them to cut apart northern armies that were much larger than they were while suffering few casualties.

It took several years for the northern generals to adapt.  That's why the north did so badly in the first couple of years of the War.  The one time Lee charged across a field instead of digging in and waiting to be attacked was at the Battle of Gettysburg. That battle was a big win for the north and a big loss for the south.

Most European powers sent "observers" to the Civil War.  But this was a war fought by "colonials", not real European soldiers.  But wait, there's more.  The famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" happened at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.  This battle involved European soldiers on both sides.  The soldiers out in the open, the now famous Light Brigade, were mowed down almost to a man.

The European generals should have learned from either the Civil War or Balaclava, but they didn't.  At least not as quickly as they should have.  But they eventually figured it out and lines of soldiers in uniforms blasting away at each other eventually disappeared from the field of battle.

The Civil War was responsible for another innovation, the machine gun.  The "Gatling Gun" saw first use during that war.  But only a few of them were available so they did not play a significant role in the outcome.  The Gatling Gun is a big heavy unwieldy device.  It was quickly replaced by smaller, lighter, but equally deadly devices like the "Maxim Gun".  Maxim's design was quickly copied and other, even lighter and more compact designs soon followed.

Machine guns in a number of configurations were in wide use by the time World War I started.  Again the generals completely underestimated the ability of as few as one machine gun's ability to totally disrupt an infantry charge.  This didn't stop general after general on all sides from ordering up senseless charge after senseless charge.  The result was mass slaughter which went on for years even though it only took about six weeks for it to become apparent that an infantry charge, no matter how aggressively prosecuted, was doomed to failure.

What made it obvious that the old tactics didn't work any more was the emergence of something called "the western front" about six weeks after the start of the War.  Armies were lined up in close proximity to each other.  But now they were located in "trenches", a feature that Lee had quickly adopted in the opening weeks of the Civil War.

In spite of this the slaughter continued unabated as general after general said "this time an infantry charge will finally work".  What broke the stalemate and led to different tactics was the introduction of the "tank".  By working together, a combination of tanks and infantry could mount a successful charge even in the face of well placed machine guns.

There were many paradigm shifts in World War II.  I am only going to briefly mention one.  Before the start of the War, the "queen of the sea" was the Battleship.  This was a large, heavily armored vessel that sported six to nine very big guns.  The barrels of these guns ranged from 14 to 18 inches in diameter.

They could hurl a "shell" weighing a couple of tons accurately into a target, say another Battleship, that was located across many miles of ocean.  A Battleship fighting another Battleship was an even match.  But a Battleship fighting a smaller ship, say a "Cruiser", could successfully take it on and easily destroy it.

The problem was that you could sink a Battleship using bombs dropped from airplanes.  And the Battleship had no effective way of fending off the airplanes.  And the ideal airport for these airplanes was a large ship called an Aircraft Carrier.  The cost and complexity of the two ship types were comparable.  Both were fantastically expensive to build so a country could only afford to build a few.  And more of one type inevitably meant fewer of the other type.

Pearl Harbor effectively demonstrated the relative effectiveness of the two ship types.  The Japanese won the battle using all Aircraft Carriers and no Battleships in the battle.  The losing US forces consisted of all Battleships and no Aircraft Carriers.  None of the Japanese ships were sunk.  Many of the US ships were sunk.  In World War II the Aircraft Carrier grabbed the title of "queen of the sea" away from the Battleship.

And there is a paradigm shift that happened not long after that war that hasn't really garnered much notice.  World War II involved large armies operating in opposition to each other.  If we include their equivalent at sea and in the air then we can say that nothing else mattered to the outcome of the War.  Korea was roughly the same.

On one side you had the armies of North Korea eventually augmented by the armies of China.  On the other side you had the armies of South Korea augmented by the armies of the US and other UN allies.  But it was, for the most part, an army versus army affair.  It turns out that was the last time that happened.

Vietnam marked a fundamental change.  On one side you had a traditional army, mostly the US army but also the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  On the other side you had North Vietnam.  It had a traditional army.  But for the most part the fighting was done not by the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, but instead by the Vietcong, a "guerilla" army.  The Vietcong was NOT organized like a then traditional army.  But it won in the end.

It engaged not in set piece large "army on army" battles, but instead in hit and run, wear them down, tactics.  This was not unlike the tactics that American forces used until late in the Revolutionary War.  The Vietcong would strike and then fade back into the Vietnamese civilian population.

The US could have won the war by engaging in a genocidal slaughter of the Vietnamese population.  If they killed all the civilians, a capability they certainly had, they would have left the Vietcong no place to hide.  At that point the military superiority of US forces could have made short work of the Vietcong.  They rightly chose not to do that and lost the war as a result.

And that set the pattern for most future military engagements.  On one side you often have a regular army constructed along roughly traditional lines.  On the other side you have a guerilla force that can engage in hit and run tactics then fade into the civilian population.  The best outcome from the "traditional army" side is a long drawn out stalemate.  At some point the civilian population may turn against the guerillas and rat them out.

But another common outcome is that the guerilla force eventually outlasts the regular army side.  They either win or the situations transitions to a negotiated power sharing arrangement.  I will note that in almost all circumstances, the guerilla army is able to continue fighting for long periods of time because it gets substantial outside support.

With that let me finally turn to the issue at hand.  And the issue is best understood in what I just argued was an obsolete configuration, that of regular army against regular army.  The event that triggered this post was the recent attack against Saudi oil facilities.

As I write this it is unclear who initiated the attack or who was behind it.  The attack involved what was originally reported to be something like nineteen separate strikes against two of Saudi Arabia's largest oil processing facilities.  As far as we know, there was no advanced warning.  There was certainly no effective defense.  There is even a small amount of confusion as to what type of weapon was used.  Initial reports characterized them as drones.  Later reports indicate that it might have been a mixture of drones and rockets.

What this attack indicates is the level of maturity of drones as weapons of war.  The closest parallel is with airplanes.  The Wright Brothers flew the first successful "heavier than air" machine.  (Balloons, dirigibles, zeppelins, etc., are all characterized as "lighter than air".)  About five years later, the Wright brothers made and flew a machine that was fully maneuverable.  (The original machine was only capable of flying in a straight line.)  About a decade after that first flight, World War I broke out.

At the start of the War airplanes appeared to have no military use.  But people quickly figured out that they could be used effectively for reconnaissance.  The addition of a camera resulted in a mature reconnaissance capability.  But how to arm them?

This was solved within a couple of years by mounting machine guns that were synchronized so they did not shoot the propeller away.  Larger four engine planes were quickly developed that could drop modest but significant amounts of bombs on a remote target.  By the end of the War the airplane had completed its transformation into a fully mature machine of war.  Everything afterwards, with the possible exception of the Aircraft Carrier, was just a refinement.

Drones have not progressed quite that quickly.  The first drone was the V-1 "Buzz Bomb" Nazi terror weapon.  It consisted of a jet engine mounted on an explosive filled conventional airframe.  Added to this was a primitive navigation system consisting of a gyrocompass and altimeter to keep it flying straight and level.  The V-1 was fueled with a precise amount of fuel.  The machine would fly until it ran out of fuel.  Then it would crash and blow up.

They were not very accurate so they had to be aimed at a large target like the city of London.  That might have been good enough except for a British program called "Double Cross".  It was also called the "twenty" program because two the "X"s in Double Cross add up to twenty in roman numerals.

The program's main objective was to capture every single spy the Nazis sent to England.  They actually succeeded.  Most of the spies were killed or imprisoned.  But the others were set up with "clandestine" radios so they could send messages back to Germany.  But all the radios were really run by the British.

And one of the things they did was send back bogus information about where the V-1 drones had crashed.  The Nazis thought they were pulverizing London.  In fact they were mostly blowing holes in fields outside London.  The Nazis never caught on to the deception.

So the Nazis pioneered drone technology but were unable to use it effectively.  But the advent of small, power stingy computers changed all that.  That, and GPS.  Jet engine design has improved substantially since the V-1.  But even the primitive jet in the V-1 was good enough.  Airframe design has advanced too since the V-1.  But the airframe of the V-1 was also good enough.  Explosives have progressed little since the V-1 so it goes without saying (but I'll say it anyhow) that the old explosives were good enough.

What has progressed is the ability to fly a small robot aircraft, and that's all a drone is, along a complex flight path and then cause it to hit a small target like a building.  It took a fairly long time for this capability to be developed.

The most important component was a small, light, powerful, computer that used very little power.  These were not really available until about 1990.  Now you can buy one for less than $25.  It has also helped that small light-weight cameras and other sensors are now both inexpensive and widely available.  The last piece of the puzzle was GPS.

The second generation of drones were the "cruise missiles", first developed by the US military, but soon after by others.  These were primitive by modern standards and wildly expensive.  For this "second generation" drone GPS was not available but an adequate but very hard to use alternative was found.  They weren't ready for combat use at the time of the Gulf War (1990-91) but were ready for the Iraq War (2003 and onward).  They were a significant component of the "Shock and Awe" opening to that war.

The modern story of drones has been a gradual evolution of early cruise missiles.  The first upgrade was to replace the old navigation system with GPS.  I am not going to go into the details but with the old system the path the drone had to fly was tightly constrained by the limitations of the navigation system.

GPS freed the drone to fly any path the operator wanted.  This meant it could be "programmed" to fly around defensive installations and the like.  This upgrade was not available for use in the Iraq War but rolled out shortly thereafter.  It has been a standard feature of drones ever since.

Since then, changes have been more evolutionary than revolutionary.  Originally, a "drone" was different than a "cruise missile".  Early drones were like early airplanes.  They were easy to adapt for reconnaissance duties.  And early drones were flown by hand.  The first couple of generations required a high degree of piloting skills to operate.  They also started out pretty small.  Cruise missiles, on the other hand, were "launch and forget" devices.  They were on their own to perform their missions.

But over time drones got bigger and more capable.  Once a certain size was reached it was possible to attach a bomb.  The first "bomb" was actually a Hellfire missile.  But that was because these early generation drones were very expensive.  By having it fire a Hellfire it was not necessary to sacrifice the primary vehicle (the drone) in order to blow something up.  And the top of the line military drones are still very expensive.  But the price and capability of entry level drones has come down rapidly.

We now think nothing of having a smart phone with a GPS receiver in it.  It is also capable of running a sophisticated "nav" application.  It is obvious from this that a light, power stingy, powerful, "nav" package is now both cheap and easy to come by.  And airframes have always been relatively cheap.  Engines, propeller or jet, have also gone way down in price.  Explosives have never been expensive nor required any great skill to employ.  The result is that drones have gotten cheaper and easier to design, build, and operate year by year.

Drones that can be "flown" by relatively low skill operators have now been available for years.  And this capability is no longer expensive.  Anyone can now buy a hobby quadcopter where the onboard computer supplies most of the skill necessary to keep it in the air.  Amazon has an assortment priced from $50 to $500.  From there it is not a big step to a drone that flies itself.

My point is that it is now possible for a mid-sized nation state to develop a pretty sophisticated drone for a manageable number of millions of dollars.  Once the design is set then very capable units should cost less than $100,000 each to manufacture.  In the military hardware business, that's dirt cheap.  A country like Iran could easily afford to manufacture tens or hundreds of them.

And that's what seems to have happened.  While it is unknown, at least to the general public, who made the devices that blew up the Saudi oil facilities, nor where exactly they were launched from, nor the path they flew, we do know that all this is within Iran's capability.

Iran has actually shown considerable skill in this area.  They have developed (or modified designs they got from elsewhere) a number of rockets and drones.  Several years ago a very sophisticated US drone was downed over Iran.  There was an argument at the time about whether it crashed due to mechanical problems or was shot down.  But, in either case the Iranians ended up with physical possession of it.  That means that at a minimum they could reverse engineer the airframe and power plant.

Then a few weeks ago they shot down a high flying US drone.  In this case there is no question.  They shot it down.  This means they currently have the capability to fly a rocket to an altitude of 70,000 feet and hit (or blow up) a relatively small device, the drone.  That's a substantial rocket capability.  They are known to also have much larger rockets.

Whether they can be used for the kind of precision mission the Saudi strike represents is unknown.  But they can certainly fly a large chunk of explosive to within the boundaries of a town or city.  There they can cause it to explode just like the V-1 did.  My point is that they have developed a substantial level of technological capability.

And the design, construction, and operation of drones no longer requires all that much technological capability.  And, most importantly, Iran is NOT a super-power.  It is not even a great power.  It is, at best, a power.  But that's all it now takes to be a major player in the business of using drones as weapons of war.  And there are a lot of countries that have capabilities roughly similar to Iran's.  This is no longer a game that is restricted to just the big boys.

And my larger question is:  does this represent a paradigm shift in the way war is waged?  I think it does.  Consider the tank.  Tanks are extremely expensive to develop and very expensive to manufacture.  The drone is a very good tank-killer.  It is much cheaper than a tank and the tank really doesn't mount an effective defense to a drone attack.

The last time tanks were used effectively was in the Iraq War, a war in which drones played no substantial role.  That War represented special circumstances for other reasons too.  Before active combat started the US and its allies completely destroyed the Iraqi capability to put anything into the air.  So, the Iraqis could use only ground based defensive measures.  The Iraqis had lots of tanks of their own so they stood a good chance anyway, right?  Wrong.

Before they even attacked, the US and its allies were very effective at finding where many Iraqi tanks were located.  This made them easy to destroy as soon as the offensive started.  The US also had an airplane called a Warthog that was a great tank-killer.  Warthogs killed a lot of Iraqi tanks but the Iraqis killed no Warthogs.

There were very few tank-on-tank battles in that war.  There has been substantially no tank-on-tank warfare since.  Tanks are now far easier to kill than they are to build and operate.  The US military knows this and has been trying to de-emphasize tanks.  But building tanks brings a lot of money into a congressional district so Congress keeps forcing them to build more.

The performance of Jet Fighters is limited by the amount of punishment a pilot's body can take.  It is relatively easy to build a high performance military jet that will kill anyone on board long before the plane itself suffers any damage.  Boeing has a contract to turn a standard Airforce fighter jet into an unmanned vehicle.  The Airforce doesn't like to talk about this project because the Airforce is run by pilots.  In their heart of hearts they know they are obsolete but admitting that would cause them to eventually lose their jobs.

Their is an argument going on now about giving an unmanned drone a mission and sending it on its way without a human in the loop.  Supposedly, this is caused by a concern that these devices will go rogue and start wiping out large numbers of the wrong people.  That's not a worry I share.  But unmanned autonomous vehicles of all kinds represent a massive paradigm shift.  This will threaten the position and power of a large group of currently very powerful people and institutions like the US Airforce.

World War I shows just how resistant people can be to this kind of change.  Literally millions of lives were lost after it was blindingly obvious to everyone from generals to buck privates that the old military tactics no longer worked.  I think the attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure is a clear example of how much things have changed.  But no one was killed and the Saudis say they can get everything back working within a couple of weeks.

I am not sure that I believe the Saudis.  But the Nazis threw large amounts of resources and creativity at recovering from bomb damage during World War II.  Time after time they were able to get facilities back online and producing within remarkably short periods of time.  Certainly the Saudis have the will and the resources to do the same when it comes to quickly getting their facilities back online.

But what if the Iraqis (or whoever) launch an attack that is ten times as large?  Whoever it was, I don't think the recent attack was all that difficult or expensive to mount.  So why shouldn't they mount another attack or a bigger attack or both?  And then another and then another.

The rules have changed.  The paradigm has shifted.  And a quick study of any of the military paradigm shifts I listed above will demonstrate that being on the wrong side of a paradigm shift is extremely costly in blood, treasure, and the national interest.

The US has been in the vanguard when it comes to developing, improving, and using drones.  That leads many Americans to believe we are on the right side of the paradigm shift.  But I don't think the US at any level has seriously considered the ramifications of the fact that counties like Iran can now play drones right back at us and our allies.

It is time to figure out how to operate effectively in this new regime.  I see no evidence that anyone in the US is trying to make the appropriate adjustments.  We continue to spend most of our military budget on things like tanks, solutions appropriate for the last war.  Or was it the war before that?

Demystifying Trump

I have been mystified by the Trump phenomenon for many years.  I was especially mystified by his successful run for the Presidency.  Since then, I have been mystified by the fact that his poll numbers have remained rock solid in the low 40's.  Every way I looked at it, it made no sense.  Then I had a breakthrough.

It was one of those "carom shot" things.  Something that was, for the most part, completely unrelated sparked an idea.  And the idea caused the clouds to part and it all finally made sense to me.  So my thanks to Ron Judd.  He writes for the local newspaper, The Seattle Times.

A month or so ago he wrote a piece for the paper on an, at best, peripheral subject.  The piece was called "Lunar Lunacy" and it was about conspiracy theories and why they are so persistent.  He covered many theories but spent most of his time on the one that posits that the Apollo moon landings were faked.

He confessed to complete bafflement about the zombie-like way that it and other similar conspiracy theories would not die.  He went on a some length about all the ways it had been discredited over the years.  Yet it nevertheless persists all the way down to today.

As I worked my way through the story I said to myself "wait -- I know what is going on".  Because his article caused  me to make a connection to a post from several years ago (I wrote it in 2014) called "Faith Based Conflict Resolution".  Here's the link:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/12/faith-based-conflict-resolution.html.  Please read it.  In it I provide quite a bit of in depth analysis supporting my thesis.  But I am going to summarize the principal finding here.

Modern religion ask their adherents to "have faith", not because of the facts, but in spite of them.  Science grew out of a growing belief that the old system was badly flawed.  The old system was an appeal to authority.  The path to truth had led people to the feet of the powerful.  Political, military, or religions leaders must know more or be able to understand better than the average person.  So find out what they think and go with that.

But authority figures get it wrong, at least some of the time.  Was there a way to achieve a better "batting average", to get it right more often, more completely, and with more confidence?  About four hundred years ago an alternative mechanism emerged that claimed to do just that.  It was what we now call science.  Since then it has racked up an impressive record of delivering on that early promise.

Science is fact based and analytical.  It accords extra weight to authorities in strict proportion to how closely they hew to the scientific method for finding and recognizing truth.  This was profoundly uncomfortable.  The old way had worked well for a very long time in a very wide number of situations.  It was the "natural way of doing things".

But science by every measure proved to just be better than the old way at finding reliable truth.  That should have been enough but it was not.  People still yearned to go back to the old way.  And this was particularly true in the field of religion.

Some of the biggest early triumphs of science had to do with showing that various religious beliefs were wrong.  The Catholic Church, the dominant religion in Europe at the time, had gotten heavily invested in what we now call cosmology.  I am not going to go into the whys of this.  But the Church decided as a matter of theology that the Earth was the center of the universe and that it was "fixed". It did not rotate.

Science convincingly showed that this was wrong.  After a few more tussles of this type religion, or at least Christian religion, adjusted.  They decided that the bible was not the literal truth.  Instead it was a metaphor.  That did not diminish its ability to be a font of reliable information about morality and how to lead a good life.  It just wasn't to be seen as the last word in these other areas.  That's the story they told.  If we look at mainline protestant churches in the US in the '60s, this is how they operated.

But many people found this profoundly unsettling.  It was just too indirect.  They yearned for "that old time religion".  And that led to a giant shift away from mainstream Protestantism toward a "fundamentalist" approach.

They went back to the idea that the bible represented literal truth.  And their approach to dealing with the contradictions science had uncovered was to put them to the side.  People needed to have faith in spite of these contradictions.  In their "faith life" they needed to completely ignore the factual basis on which science operated and hew strictly to their belief system.

I ended up digressing much longer than I initially intended but the historical and philosophical background is important.  For the purposes of our discussion the key take away is this demand to put aside facts and data and instead "go with your what your gut tells you the truth is".

Large numbers of people turned out to be willing to do this.  More, they happily did this.  And for these people a fact based argument is a complete waste of time.  It is not persuasive.  Once you have gotten into the habit of ignoring lots of facts, ignoring a few more is easy.

So if a conflict can not be resolved by resorting to facts, data, analysis, and logic, what's left?  What's left is power.  Who is the most powerful authority figure around and what does he (it's almost always a "he") have to say?

And that's why it was common in the middle ages to resort to war.  God is looking down on us, the argument went.  He would not be so cruel as to let the wrong side win the war.  So whichever side won the war must have had God on their side all along.  And whichever side God is on is, by definition, the right side  The end.

What's all this got to do with Donald Trump?  Everything.  I am a science type of guy.  I have repeatedly tried to apply the tools of science to understand why people support Trump.  It doesn't work.  What does work is to look at things the way they do and apply the kind of thinking they use.  When you do this, everything makes sense.  Let me show you.

Trump is not a religious person in spite of the support of the religious right that he has been able acquire and maintain.  And that turns out to not be important.  What is important is that he is definitely "faith based" in his way of thinking.

Many of his supporters are similar in that, whether they are or are not strongly religious, they do subscribe to a "faith based" approach to understanding the world around them.  And that leads them to seek out the person who displays the most leadership, who is the "alpha male", if you will.

Trump's successful Presidential campaign, and his leadership style since, boils down to "I am the alpha male".  He waged a campaign of intimidation against his fellow Republicans in the GOP primary.  The fact that he succeeded in spite of the fact that the "smart money" consistently predicted failure, just proves his bona fides.  The general election can be boiled down to a single image, that of Trump stalking Clinton in one of the debates.  That is a classic "alpha male" move.

To Trump's followers, leaders are special people.  They are different from the rest of us.  One way they distinguish themselves is by consistently getting away with things other people, even other politicians, can't get away with.  The more you get away with, the greater of a leader you must be.  With great leaders, the proper role for the rest of us is to get in line and follow.

Trump was repeatedly able to get away with lying, insulting his opponents, showing himself to be ignorant of all the minutia a "leading politician" is supposed to know, and many other things.  He repeatedly demonstrated his specialness by getting away with things lesser candidates couldn't.

This turns the way we should interpret a lot of the last three years inside out.  All the gaffs, blunders, illegality, stupidity, etc., that he and his close associates were able to get away with did not prove his unsuitability for the job.  Instead it demonstrated how high he stood above the pigmies he was surrounded by or was being compared to.  Instead of being unsuited to the job, he was super-suited to the job.

Remember, facts literally don't matter.  As long as he can convince his supporters that he is the alpha-est of alpha males then they will stick with him.  To them every new incident is just more proof that he deserves to continue to occupy the highest job in the land.  If you want to understand why his supporters stick with him, this is the reason.

Moving away from the specific and turning toward the more general, his supporters are not entirely wrong.  The most efficient and effective type of government is an authoritarian government headed by the perfect leader, what Confucius called roughly three thousand years ago, the "philosopher king".

"King" is a title denoting absolute authority.  The King leads and everybody else follows.  This results in everyone efficiently pulling in the same direction.  And this maximizes the performance of the country being led thusly.  But this system depends critically on the characteristics of the King.  If he truly is made of superior stuff them the country is efficiently led in the proper direction.   That's whaere the "Philosopher" part came in.

In modern parlance, the term "philosopher" has become associated the kind of person who is too smart for his own good, who spends all his time studying esoterica, and who is completely lacking in common sense. That is not at all what Confucius had in mind.  He meant something that is almost the complete opposite.

A Confucian "philosopher" is smart, experienced, educated, and grounded.  This lets him see the correct path ahead clearly and unerringly guide the rest of us lesser mortals down that path.  An authoritarian regime led by a Philosopher King, and administered by a large cadre of lesser but similarly inclined government officials is bound to achieve greatness.

The Chinese of Confucius' time did no better than the rest of us at elevating only philosopher kings to the position of Emperor.  But one place where the Chinese did succeed was in establishing and maintaining a cadre of bureaucrats in the "philosopher king" mold.  The system that produced these administrators persisted for a couple of millennia.  And it served China well.

A whole system was put into place to churn out the mid-level functionaries that kept the machinery of governance running smoothly.  As Emperors came and went, some of them good, some of them not so, the machinery of governance hummed along.

This was the actual secret behind the astounding success and longevity of China as a country.  It was only the persistent onslaught of various Europeans in the 1800s that packed a punch strong enough to destroy the Chinese bureaucracy and with it the ability of the Chinese to govern themselves well.

The resilience of the Chinese system in the face of insult from internal or external forces is proof of what in the best circumstances an authoritarian government is capable of.  At its best, it is unbeatable.  At far from its best, it is still very capable.  So it is not nuts for people to be willing to subscribe to the authoritarian model of governance over a democratic one.

But the authoritarian model has s giant weakness.  It is the leadership/succession problem.  So much depends on the quality of the person at the top.  How to you arrange thigs so that only Philosopher-class individuals ascend to the top spot?  No one has figured that out.  Not the Chinese.  There were a lot of piss poor Emperors in among the great ones.

Not Communist dictatorships or their close cousins, the publicly traded corporations.  Both say they use a "merit based" system of succession, but the facts often don't match the theory.  The process gets subverted routinely.  And certainly not Europeans with their blood line based succession rules.  But let's skip over how Trump got to be President and who should succeed him and focus on the here and now.

But first, it is important to point out that a "faith based" approach is the norm.  It is the "science based" approach that is the exception.  We consider the "science based" approach to be the norm only because of recent history.  What specific recent history?  Glad you asked.

The generals in World War I made a big mistake.  They underestimated the power of the machine gun to destroy a standard infantry charge.  This led to years of mass slaughter, slaughter that was on such a scale as to be beyond imagining.  Except, of course, for the obvious fact that it was actually happening.

In a fit of desperation the generals went to poison gas.  This just increased the amount of slaughter without changing anything.  Then there was the advent of the airplane and the tank.  One was not even a tool of war when the War started.  The other was literally invented in the middle of the War.  Machine guns, submarines, airplanes, and tanks all emphasized the critical importance of technology in war and in the newfound ability of war to perpetrate mass slaughter.

Then we had World War II, the "wizard war".  It demonstrated that the rate of slaughter could be raised to even higher levels.  Technology played an even more crucial part in this war and everybody knew it.  Anyone with an even passing interest in the period can list technological marvel after technological marvel that became closely associated with that War.

Then we rolled into the Cold War with hardly a break.  It is hard to get more "wizard" than intercontinental rockets and Hydrogen bombs, both likely controlled by computers.  And the casualty figures associated with even a small nuclear exchange, should the Cold War turn Hot, would have caused the losses of World War II to pale by comparison.

So the fear of losing present or future wars forced people to take the scientific approach to things.  The space race, the context for the moon landing hoax, was a way of saying at the time "our wizards are better than your wizards so we'll win the next war".  "Winning" would have resulted in horrific levels of death and destruction.  "Losing" would have been even worse.  And that forced people into a "whatever it takes" approach.  And "whatever it takes" meant science based thinking.

By the time Apollo program, the program that was a big hoax according to the "Lunar Lunacy" conspiracy theory in Judd's piece, spooled out in the late '60s and early '70s, this kind of thinking was already peaking.  As the Cold War ground on it seemed somehow less and less real.  This was coupled with the fact that a "science based" approach to war fighting in the nuclear era was so horrible to contemplate that people naturally recoiled from it.  And that opened the door to a reversion to the norm.

 The '70s were a time of flower power, pyramid power, "turn on, tune in, drop out", and other kinds of "alternative" ways of thinking.  All of them were a rejection of scientific thinking as part of a search for a different approach.  And at the time they were associated with the left.

Then the right came into ascendancy in '80 with the election of Reagan.  They quickly co-opted anti-science for themselves.  And they were much more successful at injecting it into mainstream society.  So the country as a whole continued to move away from science based thinking.

The Democrats, who started the change, never really completely abandoned it.  We now see this playing out in the "flower power"-esque candidacy of Marianne Williamson.  The fact that portions of the left are still comfortable with faith based thinking has had the effect of providing political cover for Republicans on the issue.

By the '90s the press had decided to join in.  They abandoned, for the most part, issues oriented political coverage and focused instead on "horse race".  "Horse race" tracks relative power, the alpha male-ishness, if you will, of the candidates.  This enabled politicians to move way from a need to have a familiarity with the issues of the day along with a competent strategy for dealing with them and toward more "warm and fuzzy".

It also led to character assassination and other dirty tricks as an important component of far too many campaigns.  In a fact-free environment, what you get when you turn away from science, this was much easier to pull off.  Why build yourself up, a hard thing to do, when you can tear your opponent down, a far easier thing to do.  These kinds of "negative" campaigns are facilitated by easy access to large piles of cash.  The ever increasing dominance of "faith based' thinking led us step by step to Trump.

So what now?  The argument that he is doing a poor job for his constituents is a weak one.  The great leader can't make everything great for everybody all the time.  Some groups will have to take a back seat to others in the short run.  It is only in the long run that benefit accrues to all, or at least most.  And sacrifices are sometimes necessary.  A rear guard in an army will sometimes be required to sacrifice themselves in order to protect the rest of the army.  It is "the long term greater good" that the leader must rightly focus on.

Thinking like that is why Trump supporters have stuck with him when clear eyed scientific types have predicted that it was past the time when his failures should have led them to behave otherwise.  Will they always stick with him if he continues to fail to provide for them?  No!  In the long run they will abandon him if he consistently disappoints them for long enough.  But how long is the long run?  And how much disappointment is too much?

It is important to remember that Trump is continuing to routinely display alpha male behavior.  Every time some attack on him falls short.  Every time he does something outrageous or unprecedented or frankly illegal, and gets away with it, is fresh proof that he is still the alpha male.  His supporters explain all this away as "just an alpha male being an alpha male".

There is a direct and quicker way to dislodge Trump, out "alpha male" him.  If someone can demonstrate that they deserve a higher position than Trump many of his supporters will quickly desert him in favor of whoever this new person is.  They are looking to follow "the leader", whoever this person turns out to be.

Clinton was not able to demonstrate the appropriate alpha male characteristics.  If she had publicly tried to do so, the press (and Republicans) would have jumped all over her for being "shrill" and "unladylike".

Of course, if she would have been able to get away with behaving like an alpha male in spite of this opposition then that would just have proved her fitness.  But she never believed she would be allowed to do so, so she didn't try.  And that left the field wide open for Trump.

I am old enough to remember when aggressive Democrats were easy to come by.  But at a certain point (the '80s) that kind of behavior led directly to losses at the polls.  So they stopped doing it and internalized the lesson.  As a result, aggressive Democrats have been hard to find for a long time.

The ascendancy of Trump may have changed that.  I believe it is possible to out alpha male Trump.  I am looking for a Democratic candidate that is willing to give it a shot.  Several of the current crop look up to the challenge to me.  Should they succeed Trump's support will evaporate quickly.  Or so I believe.  We'll see.

50 Years of Sceince - Part 15

This post is the next in a series that dates back several years.  In fact, it has been going on so long that, as of this year, it would be more accurate to call it "60 Years of Science".  But I am going to stick with the old title for the sake of continuity.  And, as the title indicates, this is the fifteenth post in the series.  You can go to http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html for a post that contains links to all the entries in the series.  I will update that post to include a link to this entry as soon as I have posted it.

I take Isaac Asimov's book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science when he wrote the book (1959 - 60).  In these posts I am reviewing what he reported then noting what's changed since.  For this post I am starting with the section he titled "Strange Particles".  I will then move on to a section he titled "Inside the Nucleus".  Both are from the chapter he titled "The Particles".

Nuclear Physics was in a state of chaos at the time he wrote the book.  Scientists knew something was wrong but they didn't know what it was.  Asimov includes a table in this section that lists and gives a few of the properties of 27 "subatomic particles".  In fact, at this time or shortly thereafter, there were more than a hundred "subatomic particles" that had been identified and characterized.  Given that there were only 92 "naturally occurring" elements, this was ridiculous and everybody knew it.  Before going into the "fix" let me review what Asimov had to say.

Antiparticles like the Positron, which figures in Asimov's extremely popular "Robot" Science Fiction series under the guise of the "positronic brain", and the anti-Proton had been discovered.  This was annoying but did not disturb particle physicists much.  The idea of a particle - anti-particle duality seemed interesting but did not "threaten the very foundations of particle physics".  So, okay, it doubled (roughly) the number of subatomic particles.  That wasn't seen as any kind of big problem.

And the Neutron, the "neutral Proton", was another discovery that was disconcerting but only mildly so.  What did concern them were the "mass mysteries".  It seemed reasonable that if a nucleus emitted or absorbed a particle then the combined mass/energy of everything at the beginning should match the combined mass/energy at the end.  But it didn't.  There was the whole "E equals M C squared" thing.  It could be used in circumstances where mass got turned into energy or vice versa.

"X" quantity of mass was equivalent to "Y" quantity of energy.  Physicists got into the habit of converting everything into its energy equivalent.  If the "energy" going in was the same as the "energy" coming out, problem solved.  If, for instance, a photon of the required energy was either emitted or absorbed as part of the nuclear reaction, then that contribution to total mass/energy could be figured in.  But in a lot of cases, even these kinds of adjustments did not cause the "mass/energy equation" to balance.

One pleasant side effect was that nuclear physicists could go hunting around for a heretofore unknown particle to put things back in balance.  That turned out to be an extremely fruitful strategy.  This is how the neutrino was first predicted, then named (by Enrico Fermi), then discovered.  The neutrino solved the mass balance problem for a common nuclear reaction.  The "predict" and "name" step often got combined.  So it soon became common to see a "predict/name" event be followed by a "discover" event.

And that led to a game.  The "mass balance" for a particular nuclear interaction would fail to balance.  That gave you the mass/energy of a new particle.  And subatomic particles have other properties like charge and spin.  So you looked for imequalities in those other particle attributes.  It soon became a game of nuclear "Clue".  The new particle, rather than being identified as Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick became a particle with a mass of "X" and a spin of "Y" and an electric charge of "Z".  Whoever got there first got to slap a name on that particular configuration.

But it soon transpired that there were three "flavors" of neutrino, the "tau", the "mu", and the "electron".  And there was an anti-neutrino.  So, all told, six subatomic particles were eventually added to the list by the time the dust settled completely.  (And the "mu" neutrino's name was changed to "muon" neutrino for obscure reasons.)

A fruitful environment in which to play the "find the new subatomic particle" game grew out of an attempt to figure out what was gluing the nucleus of atoms together.  Heisenberg, started this investigation in 1932, Asimov notes.  He hypothesized that "exchange forces" would come into play as particles continuously switched identities with other particles in the nucleus.  It quickly became apparent that these exchange forces could be modeled as particles shuttling back and forth.  And if it's a particle, we can play nuclear Clue and come up with a list of attributes.  And at that point we can start looking for proof of existence.

Evidence was shortly found for a "Meson" that seemed to fit the bill.  But things did not exactly work out.  That led to the original meson being renamed to the "mu meson" (and eventually the "muon" meson).  A new particle, named the "pi meson" got added to the list of subatomic particles.  It fit the original requirements better than the mu meson.  But there were still missing pieces of the puzzle.  I'll get back to that in a minute.

An interesting side effect of this investigation that Asimov notes, is that it hinted that Protons and Neutrons were not simple indivisible particles.  It looked like they had internal structure.  This hint was still hanging out there tantalizingly when Asimov completed his book.  Nuclear physicists didn't know what to do with it.

Anyhow, it turned out to be fairly easy to come up with a nuclear physics experiment that would turn up something puzzling.  And the solutions to all of these puzzles were more and more subatomic particles.  This led shortly to the "K-mason".  And now there were three, and we are only talking about mesons.  Something called "hyperons" was quickly added.  And then "lambda particles" and "sigma particles" and "xi particles".  And some of these were actually closely related families of particles in the mode of neutrinos.  And, of course, you had particles and anti-particles.  It seemed to go on and on.

Quoting Asimov:

All in all, nuclear physics is currently a  wonderland -- or a jungle, if you prefer -- awaiting further exploration.  At the latest count there are some 29 or 30 particles, detected or predicted, and no one could say that this was the end.

And bear in mind, that this "29 or 30" figure actually collapses many particle/anti-particle pairs or families of similar particles into a single entry.  At the time Asimov wrote the book particle physicists were pretty sure they were missing a fundamental insight.  They just didn't know what it was.

The missing insight was the "Quark".  Things continued to go from bad to worse.  Then some people started doing the same thing Mendeleev had done when he organized the first periodic table of the elements.  By arranging subatomic particles appropriately then noting regularities in the progression of properties the idea of sub-sub-atomic particles emerged.  A short list of Quarks could be combined in various ways to produce combinations that matched many of the particles in the list.

Particles like the Proton and Neutron were composed of three Quarks.  The Mesons were composed of two Quarks.  And so on.  Going hand in hand with this idea was the idea of "Gluons", exchange particles that moved from particle to particle to "exchange" some attribute like mass or charge or spin or whatever.  Listing all the combinations of how three (or two) Quarks could be combined reproduced many of the particles in the list.  Organizing Gluons along similar lines resulted in a nice neat list that was based on a list of sub-components now of reasonable and manageable length.

And in a manner similar to the periodic table of elements, holes in the pattern were detected.  That led to a hunt for particles with the appropriate attributes.  They were all eventually found.  The last to be found was something called the "Higgs Boson".   The LHC at CERN was built specifically to find the Higgs Boson and it was a big deal when it was found.

And with its discovery, one of the classic doors to new discovery was closed.  The "Standard Model", the modern model of how nuclear physics works, has no holes needing to be filled.  This is driving the current generation of particle physicists nuts.  New physics is what makes working in the field interesting and exciting.  With no holes in the list, physicists don't know where to go to look for new physics.

When Asimov was writing, the modern conception of four fundamental forces was just coming into focus.  They are Gravity, Electromagnetism (what many people think of as two forces, electricity and magnetism, are actually one force that manifests itself in two apparently dissimilar ways), and what we now call the "Strong Nuclear Force" and the "Weak Nuclear Force".

The idea that there were two "Nuclear" forces was a new one at the time of the book's writing.  Of the two, the Weak force was by far the least weird.  The Weak force is what causes nuclear decay.  The Strong force is what binds the nucleus of atoms together.

What makes the Strong force weird is that it gets stronger as you move particles away from each other. If you move two electrons further apart their electrical charges repel each other more weakly.  If you move two masses farther apart they gravitationally attract each other more weakly.  This "it gets weaker as distance increases" behavior is what we commonly associate with forces.  But the Strong force gets stronger the further apart you move two particles subject to its influence.

It is now easy to see how this keeps atomic nucleuses together.  If you want to inflate the size of the nucleus you have to add energy.  And the farther you inflate it the more energy it takes to inflate it just a little more.  Beyond a certain distance the amount of energy to inflate it a little more goes up literally astronomically.

If you have everything else you need then you can make a Quark if you have enough energy laying around.  So, if you pull two particles that are subject to the Strong force apart far enough, there is enough "Strong Force" energy available to create an additional Quark.  And if you do that (create a third Quark between the first two) then the now shorter distances between the various particles reduces the "Strong Force" energy of the system as a whole by enough to balance off the energy you used to create the Quark.

So if you inject enough energy to almost smash things apart what you end up doing is creating more Quarks instead.  So you end up with a nucleus that is again stable.  It just has an extra Quark or two in it.  This goes a long way to explaining why many nucleuses are stable in spite of the fact that each Proton is mightily resisting being in close proximity to other Protons a short distance away.

What's going on with this "inverse distance" thing with the Strong force?  I don't know.  Physicists don't either.  But the whole Quantum Mechanics thing that happened several decades earlier caused a sea change in the way nuclear physicists think.  They now focus on figuring out what the rules are.  They have stopped trying to figure out why the rules are the way they are.  At this point, you can't blame them.  This stuff is weird beyond imagination.

Asimov then talks about "strange particles".  He is talking about interactions (and the Gluons that "mediate" those interactions) that are associated with the Weak force.  That usage has gone out of fashion.  There is now a "Strange" Quark and to continue to use the "strange particles" construction would invite confusion.

Instead, all of the mediating particles are now classed as Mesons.  There are something like 150 of them.  This large number stems from the fact that the number of different environments in which an interaction can take place is quite large.  But, in a lot of cases it is more a matter of degree than it is a matter of something truly different going on.  So, physicists consider many of these "particles" as variations on a theme.  They don't worry all that much if the list is complete and correct.

Asimov concludes this section with a discussion of "Parity".  What's Parity?  It's complicated so I am not even going to bother.  What is important is that, just like mass and spin and charge, it is another attribute that is supposed to be "conserved" in nuclear interactions.

The net Parity of the result was supposed to be the same as the net Parity of the starting components.  But some early experiments suggested that this was not true.  Shortly before the book was written, the definitive experiment was done that proved that Parity conservation does not occur in some circumstances.  That's where things sat when Asimov finished his book.

Since then, a ton of research, both theoretical and experimental, has been done around what is now referred to as the "Charge-Parity violation" problem.  It is often short handed as "CP violation".  I am not going to dive into the subject because frankly I don't understand it all that well.  Let's just say it is a very active area of current investigation and leave it at that.  And with that, we can move on to "Inside the Nucleus".

The simplest model for the shape of the nucleus is that of a sphere.  The best experiments done then, and experiments that have been done since, indicated that's about right.  There is a slight deviation from purely spherical but it is small.  Another idea that had been developed by the time Asimov was writing was the "liquid-drop" model of the nucleus.  This is important if you trying to figure out what will happen if you hit the nucleus with something.

If you hit a drop of water with a tiny piece of sand, what happens?  Well, if it is going very slowly it is likely absorbed by the drop.  If it is going very fast, then it tends to drill straight through and leave without having changed the drop much.  But if it is going at an intermediate speed it may smash the drop into smithereens.  If you think about it, this kind of understanding is important if you are trying to make a nuclear explosion.

You need to figure out what will happen if you throw a neutron at the nucleus of a Uranium atom.  Fast neutrons tend to bore through and leave an intact nucleus behind.  Not good.  Slow neutrons tend to be absorbed and also not change things much.  But neutrons hitting at the right speed will smash the Uranium nucleus to pieces.

A "smashed to pieces" Uranium nucleus releases a lot of energy.  It also, if you are lucky, flings out some more neutrons that can, if they end up moving the right speed, smash more Uranium nucleuses apart.  A lot of atomic bomb design issues center around ways to get lots of neutrons of the right speed flying around in such a way that they would smash other Uranium nucleuses to pieces.

If you know how to do this, call Los Alamos.  They have a job waiting for you.  Of course, even if Asimov knew about the tie between the liquid-drop model and atomic bomb research, he wouldn't have been allowed to say anything.  But over time this sort of thing eventually dribbles out.  Designing an atomic bomb is complex.  But a lot of the "how to" is now out there if you are smart and know where to look.

We mostly now depend on the fact that highly enriched Uranium is hard to come by.  With "natural" Uranium, the kind found in the ground, the ratio between the U-235 and the U-238 isotopes is about 0.7% U-235 and about 99% U-238.  With "bomb grade" Uranium the U-235 ratio has been "enriched" to the point where it constitutes about 90% of the total.  Fortunately, the physical process of Uranium enrichment is very hard to do.  That's true even though learning "how to" is again easy to do.  Hint:  You need specially designed "bleeding edge" centrifuges and you need a lot of them.

Asimov dishes out more information that would be helpful to a bomb builder without quite saying that's what he is up to.  In general, his observation that large nucleuses, like that of Uranium and the trans-uranic elements (those with atomic numbers higher than Uranium's 92) tend to be "unstable", is correct.  They can be broken into smaller pieces fairly easily so they make good fuel for nuclear weapons.

Asimov also discusses the "shell" model of the nucleus.  This is where "nucleons" (Protons and Neutrons) are arranged in concentric shells.  More powerful colliders have allowed physicists to get a clearer picture of what the situation is than what was known in Asimov's day.  The shell model seems to be generally accurate.

Of course, things are complicated by the fact that nucleons are constructed from Quarks.  So there are about three times as many particles rattling around in the nucleus than was thought in Asimov's time.  Worse yet, the weird way the Strong Force works makes things devilishly complex.

It takes really smart people to figure out what's going on even with modern supercomputers and much more powerful colliders.  I'm not going to go into it further except to note something Asimov observes.  There are certain "magic numbers".

In the same way that electrons are organized in shells in the periodic table of elements, nucleons (or Quarks or whatever) seem to be organized into shells.  That results in configurations containing certain numbers of nucleons tending to result in nucleuses that are more stable (less radioactive).  That means they tend to stick around longer before they decay.  They have a longer half life.

This idea is now called "islands of stability".  The highest atomic number of an element that has been created so far is 118.  If you subscribe to this theory then it suggests that specific elements with higher atomic numbers might have relatively long half lives if you can arrange for them to have the right number of nucleons.  And that means that it might be possible to manufacture them and then have them stick around along enough to be detected.  The theory says this can be done but no one has actually done it yet.  And that's where I am going to leave this installment.

Alan Dershowitz

The impetus for this post resides in a column that was published today in my local newspaper (see https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/what-alan-dershowitz-taught-me-about-morality/).  The column was about a person named Alan Dershowitz.  Readers will fall into one of two categories at this point.  One group will be all too familiar with Mr. Dershowitz and the other will have no clue as to who he is.

For the latter, he is nominally a retired Harvard Law Professor.  But he is more broadly known for his participation in various high profile legal cases.  Although not this first high profile case, the first one that brought him wide public notice was the von Bulow case.  I will discuss that below.  But before I do that I want to cover some other things.

And one of them is the OJ Simpson case.  I have written a couple of posts on the subject.  Recently I wrote a post called "From Ito to Ellis".  Here's a link:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-ito-to-ellis.html.  It, in turn, builds on a much older post called "The OJ Trial".  Here's a link to that post:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-oj-trial.html.

But back to the newspaper column.  The author describes, among other things, her experience taking a class from Dershowitz.  As the class delved into the subject of morality they discussed several moral dilemmas.  The one I want to focus on is one that is frequently used in this context.  The setup is unimportant.  The basic issue is "what should you do if your only choices are between killing one person and killing five?"

There is a moral philosophy called "Utilitarianism" which says that you should kill the one person because it reduces the death toll from five to one.  But most people would be horrified to be responsible for the death of even one person.  And that's why this dilemma is studied.  You literally have a choice between two bad outcomes.  Utilitarianism provides little comfort even though it leads to a clear answer to the dilemma.  And that's why few people subscribe to a pure version of it.

The problem here is the closed nature of the problem as it is presented.  All other options are foreclosed by one method or another so that the sole focus is on the "one or five" decision.  But there is a person who, when confronted with a similar "all options are bad" scenario, found a solution.  His name is James Tiberius Kirk and he was, for many years, the captain of the Starship Enterprise.

Here too the problem was a hypothetical one that derived from no actual event.  It was entirely made up in order to present students with a dilemma.  It was formally known as the "Kobayashi Maru" problem.  It constituted one part of the final examination all students at Starfleet Academy had to complete in order to graduate.  An analogous situation would be a final examination that naval cadets must complete before they can graduate from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis.

And, in a manner completely analogous to the "five or one" problem, the Kobayashi Maru problem was carefully constructed so that everyone failed.  There was no action the student could take (or fail to take) that would result in a positive outcome.  Yet when Kirk was presented with that problem he, in fact, produced a positive outcome.  What did he do?

He cheated.  He managed to find a way to break into the system at the Academy and modify the problem so there was a set of actions that would result in a positive outcome.  He broke the rules.  There were strict prohibitions against that sort of thing.  But, another way of thinking about what he did was that he thought outside the box.

And thinking outside the box was something the Academy wanted to encourage in their graduates.  (This line of argument didn't get him far in the resulting legal proceedings against him.)  But the important question in this context is:  were Kirk's actions morally justified?  We'll never know what Dershowitz and others think about Kirk's actions because they have never discussed it.

Now let me circle back to the von Bulow case.  Sunny von Bulow, wife of Claus, unexpectedly entered a coma under mysterious circumstances.  The conventional wisdom was that Claus had attempted to kill her using poison and the plan had gone awry to the extent that she didn't die.  von Bulow was subsequently convicted of attempted murder.

Dershowitz was pivotal in getting that conviction reversed on appeal.  Sunny eventually died and von Bulow was eventually acquitted when the case was retried.  At no point did a viable alternative theory to the "von Bulow poisoned her" theory emerge.  Instead, Dershowitz was able to convince the appellate judge that reasonable doubt existed.  When the case was retired enough confusion had been sewn that it was easy to again effectively assert reasonable doubt.

Dershowitz has now written many books.  I have only read one of them.  "Reasonable Doubts" concerned the OJ Trial.  In the actual trial Dershowitz played only a minor role.  He was there to be ready in case an appeal was necessary.  He would have been the lead attorney in that proceeding.  But OJ was acquitted so no appeal was necessary.  The fact that he ultimately played only a minor role in the proceedings didn't stop him from writing a very interesting book on the case.

Dershowitz claims in that book that "if you aren't convicted you are totally innocent".  That is a completely ridiculous position to take.  It is correct in a very narrow legal sense when it comes to various legal proceedings but it completely wrong in pretty much any other circumstance.

Another claim Dershowitz made in the book was that while the trial was in progress he literally had no idea whether OJ did it or not.  That too is completely ridiculous.  He was (and is) a very smart man.  He had a front row seat from which to observe all of the evidence introduced at trial.  He also had access to a lot of additional evidence that never made it into the formal record of the trial.  In those circumstances it is completely unbelievable to think that he never developed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of the defendant.

But wait, there's more.  As I noted in my "OJ" post, he went out of his way to accuse LAPD Detective Philip Vannatter of being a liar.  Why?  Because Vannatter said at one point that OJ "was no more of a suspect" than one of the defense lawyers.  But Vannatter indicated that was his belief at a very early stage in the investigation.  I'm sure he was familiar with a number of cases where the initial evidence pointed strongly toward one suspect was later evidence pointed in an entirely different direction.

Characterizing OJ as a "person of interest" was certainly appropriate at that point.  But much of the evidence in the case had not yet been collected.  So a good, experienced, Detective should have an open mind at that point.  Settling on a single suspect should not be done until all available evidence has been collected and evaluated.  It should then be done only if a clear pattern has emerged and the totality of the evidence points in only one direction.

Compare this to the situation Dershowitz was in when he wrote the book in which he repeatedly averred that he had no opinion of OJ's guilt or innocence during the trial.  The Dershowitz statement is far more incredible (as in not believable) than the Vannatter statement.  And that, in my opinion, summarizes Dershowitz's thinking and his view of morality in a nutshell.

He is nothing if not consistent.  Since the OJ trial he has continued to be active.  (He is now 80 and has been retired from Harvard for a number of years.)  Harvey Weinstein is a now thoroughly disgraced movie executive.  He has become one of the poster children for the "Me Too" movement.

Many women have now come forward publicly and accused him of inappropriate (in some cases extremely inappropriate) behavior toward them.  A large operation run out of his businesses has been credibly described as existing solely to cover up his misdeeds.

Why is this coming out only now?  Many of these were women who at the time were trying to create or maintain an acting career.  That is effectively impossible to do if there is a "whisper campaign" in place accusing an actress of being hard to work with or any of a number of other vaguely negative and hard to prove or disprove accusations.  And, according to many, that was one of the principal tools the Weinstein cover up operation employed.

They effectively conveyed the message to these women that if they spoke up they would never get a job in Hollywood again.  We now have documented examples of a number of women attempting to speak up and, as a result, promptly seeing a previously promising career disappear without a trace.

Women were literally forced to decide between quietly acceding to Weinstein's outrageous wishes or speaking up and seeing their careers end prematurely.  The "old boys" network made sure that these women's accusations were not taken seriously by the authorities.  But the very same "old boys" network also made sure that an effective whisper campaign destroyed the career ambitions of these very same women.

In other words, women propositioned by Weinstein were presented with a real life version of the "five or one" dilemma.  They got to chose between the death of their carriers or the death of their dignity, self respect, sense of safety, etc.  Whichever option they chose took a serious toll on them.  As did the very process of coming to a decision.

Finally, a third option, a Kirk-ian option, if you will, became available.  The "Me Too" movement gathered enough power and momentum to force authorities to take these kinds of accusations seriously.  And it turned out that there was mountains of evidence, at least in the case of Weinstein, that the accusations were true.

These women could now defend themselves by speaking up.  And that no longer resulted in automatic career death.  Also, authorities were now forced to take the accusations seriously and investigate them.  It soon transpired that there were just too many credible accusations concerning too many men in the business for a cover up to continue happening.  In order for this change to happen something akin to the way Kirk was able to change the Academy system had to happen.

Kirk was a lone individual.  The "Me Too" movement only became effective when a large group of women decided at about the same time that the Hollywood system needed to be forced to make a similar change so that there was a way for these women to win their equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru scenario.  Is it any surprise that, once it was available, so many women chose that third option.

And where was Mr. Dershowitz in all this?  He was on Weinstein's side.  In the classroom he was happy to let the original version of the "five or one" dilemma play out.  It was, after all, "a good learning experience for the students".  He was also staunchly in favor of not changing the Hollywood version of the "five or one" scenario.  To his way of thinking, everything was working just fine.  Vigorously defend the perpetrators.  Don't give the victims the option of a positive outcome.

The latest twist in this story has to do with Jeffrey Epstein.  He is much in the news these days.  He is a millionaire predator who specializes in victimizing young women.  His name broke into the news in early July of this year when he was arrested for sex trafficing.  As soon as the news broke his earlier run in with the law along similar lines resurfaced.

It turns out that in 2005 and 2006 he was involved in a case involving accusations of him doing business with a large number of "Prostitutes".  But the "prostitutes" in this case were young women, many of whom appeared to have no connection at all with prostitution before they encountered Epstein.  (Most of them had no connection with prostitution afterwards, either.)  But he paid them, usually a few hundred dollars, to service him so that was used to label them as prostitutes.

In many cases the "services" involved consisted of a massage in which one or both parties were partially or completely undressed.  And, at least initially, the massage only included contact with his back and other non-sensitive parts of his body.  But that was not true in all cases.  Things often progressed over a number of sessions.  Let's just say that a lot of the alleged activities didn't stop at massages and leave it there.  And, as with Weinstein, Epstein is credibly charged with having a procurement/coverup operation that ran out of his business.

For a long time it looked like the prosecutors had an extremely strong case.  Conviction on all counts (many of the crimes were Federal crimes) would have put Mr. Epstein in jail for many years.  But then something very strange happened.  Alex Acosta, a Trump cabinet member (Secretary of Labor) until he resigned a couple of weeks ago, arranged for Epstein to get a sweetheart deal.

All Federal charges were dropped and a very broad non-prosecution agreement was entered into.  Instead, Epstein pleaded to a fairly minor State charge.  He served about a year in jail.  But during this time he was allowed out of jail for most of the day so he could continue to "operate his business".

There was even a super-sweetheart clause that meant he was not monitored in any way while he was out of jail.  As a result we know very little about what he actually did other than that he did not confine his activities strictly to business.  (There is some evidence of what non-business activities he engaged in and it is not good.)  All this screamed "the fix is in" both then and now.  And I haven't even listed all of the "irregularities" that have recently surfaced.

It will not come as a surprise at this point to learn that Dershowitz was on the job, as in on Epstein's side, for all of this.  He was part of Epstein's defense team for all this back in the day.  Since then, he has steadfastly defended Epstein until very recently.  He has said his involvement in the Epstein case was a mistake in public but has told another story in private.

And it will also come as no surprise that Dershowitz has spent a lot of time over the past few years defending Trump.  His public position is (paraphrasing) "every man is entitled to the presumption of innocence right up until the minute he is convicted in a court of law and all of his appeals are exhausted".  That, of course, does not comport at all with how Dershowitz acts rather than what he says.

Based on his actions, a more accurate statement if his belief is "every wealthy and/or powerful man is entitled to the presumption of innocence right up until the minute he is convicted in a court of law and all of his appeals are exhausted.  And, he is probably entitled to a presumption of innocence after that too."

Dershowitz is also a big fan of a pull out all the stops - Perry Mason style defense.  That's the strategy he used in the von Bulow appeal.  That's the strategy he employed with Epstein in 2005-2006.  It is the strategy he is now advocating for Trump.  But who does this apply to?  If you listen to what he says the answer is an unambiguous.  It applies to everybody.  But look at his actions.

von Bulow was wealthy.  OJ was less so but he was famous.  Epstein and Weinstein were wealthy and so is Trump.  (They are also all men.)  The only situation I have found where he has broken with this pattern happened three decades ago.  He represented a Rabbi (Avi Weiss), a person of modest to non-existent means, in a defamation suit involving a powerful Catholic Bishop (Jozef Glemp) and the Auschwitz concentration camp.  I think in that case his actions actually were dictated by consideration other than those of money and power.

But consider a black man of very modest means who is caught selling drugs on a street corner in his run down and crime ridden neighborhood.  Does this person deserve a "best defense" any less than von Bulow, Simpson, Epstein, etc.?  If you look at what Dershowitz says the answer is NO!  But, as far as I can tell Dershowitz has involved himself with no cases of this type.

And the fact that if he routinely and vigorously defended poor people he might eventually end up in the poor house is not a defensible argument according to the morality he so fervently and definitely and consistently espouses.  So, except for occasionally helping out a fellow Jew, a laudable thing to do, his actions shout "charity is for suckers".

I have long thought that Mr. Dershowitz is a fundamentally immoral man.   As such, we shouldn't be leaning lessons about how to navigate the moral conundrums that life routinely presents us with from people such as him.  And we certainly shouldn't be paying heed to anything he has to say on TV.  To quote the last line of the column that kicked all of this off, "your morality comes from what you do."  Mr. Dershowitz, what you DO is immoral.