Trump’s tweets about China suggest to some that the U.S. military posture with respect to the Nine Dotted Line is about to become more aggressive. Most noted is Trump’s phone conversation with the president of Taiwan, in violation of the “one China policy” of both the mainland and Taiwan, which, according Congressional Research Service (pdf), has never been explicitly agreed to by the U.S.

Note: If you’re new to this blog, you may wish to read some prior posts indexed by South China Sea Tense, and Pivot to Asia; Duterte Declares End of Philippines-U.S. War Games.

For the U.S. to exert a dominant influence on the international status of the area behind the Nine Dotted Line, there are several prerequisite conditions:

• The geopolitics must permit massive projection of power, at affordable cost, over a long period of time. This means that at least one side of the closed area, which is bounded on the west by China, must be sufficiently sympathetic to the idea of the U.S. as a policeman to commit to the cause, which would be costly.
• The “political” part of “geopolitics requires soft power.  In other words, the commercial center of the region must be elsewhere than China. Perhaps, stretching credulity to the utmost, “center” could be replaced by “alternate framework”, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership was intended to be.

Since none of the countries in the region are currently afflicted with massive disasters of government or human rights, their decisions of alignment are overwhelmingly based on economics. There are a few exceptions:

• Japan has the will, if not the means, to counter China. But Shinzo Abe has stated that the TPP would be meaningless without the U.S.  Since so much manufacturing by Japanese companies is in China, it is unlikely that that Japan’s will would endure the years of a China commercial freeze.
• Taiwan, already a  commercial appendage of China, would suffer terrible privations. But unlike any other country, the U.S. has something to trade, defense of the island. This would be costly. It could end up looking like the Berlin Airlift.
• Vietnam, the third ranking military power of the region, has recently become a massive purchaser of U.S. weapons systems. Still, cultural resistance to entangling alliances, and the recent history of the Vietnam War make it likely to continue the Dance of the Non-Aligned. Vietnam will defend itself.  But although Vietnam was locally expansionist in the 19th century, projection of power into the international realm has no precedent in the ancestral communal wisdom.
• Malaysia’s coast is hugged by the longest part of the Nine Dotted Line. But it  is in the midst of the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund scandal, in which the principle accused, Najib Razak (WSJ), happens to be the premier of the country, playing the Muslim card for adoption of strict Sharia, for his  political life in the next election against the ethnic Chinese political bloc. Supposing that Trump prevails on the D.O.J. to drop charges, China has already bailed out 1MDB.
• Australia is too far away to join the joust by themselves.

But aside from the death of the TPP, the other massive obstacle to power projection is the Philippines. Duterte can at least be credited with the most clear enunciation of why he has withdrawn from the Mutual Defense Treaty in all but name. Taken by themselves, any of his statements could be taken as gamesmanship. But a Wall Street Journal article reveals a man with a deep, personal hatred of the U.S. In case you are caught by the paywall,

Mr. Duterte’s nationalism, displayed in his angry reaction to Mr. Obama’s admonishments, echoes sentiments common among left-leaning Filipinos that America never atoned for invading the archipelago in 1898 and violently subduing the former Spanish colony. With independence in 1946, the Philippines passed into the hands of what many left-leaning politicians such as Mr. Duterte regarded as a corrupt Manila elite installed by Washington.

So, much to the shock of Washington, the Philippines has become like the butler who discloses that he’s always hated you.

A quick study of a map reveals:

• The large, central portion of the Nine Dotted Line closely skirts the Philippines.
• With the Philippines in the U.S. court, and with no other regional nation caring a whit, the U.S. could project substantial power into the area. An island is the only unsinkable ship. Unfortunately, we lost Subic Bay Naval Base in 1992, for the very reasons of Duterte’s heartfelt hate.

Absent the Philippines, the idea of an international South China Sea is dead. The concept of power projection, or intervention, is stillborn. Could Trump, with his acquiescence to governments that behave far beneath the western standard,  re-enroll the Philippines and Malaysia? If it were simply a matter of personalities, perhaps. But the TPP, which Trump seems emphatically determined to kill, has always had a pale, sickly complexion. It’s like a “colonize Mars” thingy, or a congressional bill that never received an appropriation.

The prerequisites are at odds with what Steve Bannon calls economic nationalism. So what are we to make of this? Are Trump’s advisors so naive as to think a modern fleet of Sand Pebbles gunboats can take on modern China? It’s a ludicrous thought, but consider: In 1994, what was to become the Zumwalt class of destroyers was actually conceived as a weapon system to “manage China.”

How quickly do perceptions change. Wish for a simpler time. Look for an alternate meaning, such as credibility for future bargaining on trade.

So named is the front page link to the CNN article, Iraqi battle for Mosul prompts fears of more sectarian violence.

If this were the only reason for a civil war, it might be sufficient. But such a civil war would  tend  to be contained within the the territories of contention. There is another issue, as inevitable as death itself, that will make it geopolitical in the large sense.

This is the advanced age and delicate health of Iraq’s senior cleric, Ali al-Sistani. Compared to Iran’s ample religious establishment, Iraq’s is relatively spare.  Sistani is  relatively progressive, what we would want an ayatollah to be if we had to have one. That Iraq has any independent religious establishment at all is due to his seniority. Sistani has been protective of Iraq as an independent political entity, a concern not shared by the infiltrative power brokers of Qom.

Sistani was treated for undescribed heart problems in 2004, sufficiently serious to require treatment in London. How long he will live is a very relevant question. When he passes, absorption of Iraq’s religious establishment by Qom will begin in earnest. The limited ability of the secular government to restrain the militias will vanish. Iran’s military presence, already overt, will expand. The south of Iraq   will be conjoined with Iran, even at the expense of a greater unity.

There has been speculation that the incoming administration contemplates a greater U.S. military role in Iraq. Perhaps this speculation arises from the reappearance of some of the neoconservatives responsible for the 2003 invasion. I have no opinion as to what they are thinking. But  a general question can be phrased for all  military operations mounted with less than overwhelming force.

The question is whether the environment is “permissive.” For example, if an airstrike were contemplated against a target, the question would be whether the air defenses of the target could be sufficiently degraded to permit the airstrike to be carried out with acceptable losses.

The Shiite Iraq that follows the passing of Sistani will not be a permissive setting for American operations. Other parts of it, such as the Kurdish area, might be. But the kinds of cultural shift and political combinations that would make a viable rump state are prohibited by the strange-to-us cultural animosities.  Iran, a unified and disciplined state, would  steamroller it.

Now, with the reprise of the neoconservatives, we can only watch and wonder.

 U.S. Election; United States Going Forward, Part 1, contains a broad brush enumeration of the totality of challenges that face the United States in the near to midterm future. Looming just beyond public comprehension is the Technological Singularity, with the hazard of concentration of inhuman power in the successors to biological life.

Please prove me wrong. To do so, you have your wits, and some time, at your disposal, hopefully focusing on the broad brush issues. Should you decide to accept this assignment, your obstacles are national myths, traditions, and about half  the electorate.

You’re busy biting your fingernails this election night, so I’ll keep it short. One of the easiest simplifications is to divvy part of the problem into different types of “capital.”

• Economic capital is the traditional sense of the word.
• Human capital is potentiation of human potential to facilitate, among other things, creation of more capital.
• National capital consists of hard and soft power. Hint: U.S. soft power is eroding rapidly.
• National myths can be helpful or hurtful. Sadly, there is no arguing with the true believer, the person who has swallowed the myth whole, and finds it inseparable from reality.

Spiritual values, of  which I particularly  cherish those of the Declaration of Independence, can conflict with the above. In a very real way, they exist partly inside and partly outside the question of optimizing a society for capital creation.

It wouldn’t be helpful to be more specific. I’ll permit myself one exception: Students in  public school systems should be paid for academic performance. I find it a particularly interesting idea, since adults I try it on frequently respond with a smirk.

In The FBI/ Director Comey/ Clinton Email Imbroglio, I cut the pie by distinguishing authoritarian and “ethicist” viewpoints.  It is probably impossible to define the ethicist, because the choices of the ethicist never narrow to alternatives of belief. Janet Reno exemplifies this.

In (CNN) Janet Reno, first female US attorney general, dies at 78, Eric Holder is quoted:

At a ceremony to honor Reno in 2009, then-Attorney General Eric Holder praised his predecessor for her tenacity and tireless work ethic during her eight years in the job.

“I don’t know how many times she said to me, ‘What’s the right thing to do?'” Holder said. “It was never what’s the easy thing, what’s the political thing, or the expedient thing to do.”

What’s the right thing to do? It’s the ethicist’s eternal question.

The Comey disclosures are marginal to the focus of this blog. Nevertheless, how I think about it might interest the reader, insofar as I was a “superpredictor” in the Forecasting World Events research project. It appears to me that the impact of Comey’s disclosure will be increasingly discounted by the electorate.

I’ve done a little sampling of the psychology of the American voter. A description in terms of two poles, be it  party identification, or something else, is always attractive. The selection of the poles has considerable latitude. Where the first cut on the pie is made is partly, though not completely, arbitrary.

In this particular case, a cut to the pie can be made so that “authoritarian” lies on one side, and “ethicist” on the other. That this may be an optimal way to cut the pie lies in the observation that the membership of each group implied by the names seems oblivious to the concerns of the other.

To an authoritarian, the fact that Clinton broke government regulations in the disposition of classified data, even though there is no evidence of damage, is paramount. This relates to the experience of the American blue collar worker at the hands of typical management. The theme of the work experience is that you follow company rules, or you get canned by your supervisor. There is no appeal, except with violations of civil rights laws. It’s an eight-hour a day way of life, and it’s not surprising that the demands made of the blue collar worker should be reflected in his single civic choice. To the voter of this stripe, concerns about the personal behavior of the super-rich, and their world in general, are disjoint from everyday existence. Interest in the Second Amendment is the side effect of a small stage of life. With such a small stage, the right to bear arms is one more thing you can do.

The ethicist, regardless of work background, has concerns that go beyond this. The ethicist’s world view is either expansive beyond the workplace, or in conflict with it.  The ethicist’s interpretation of the law is flexible. It might be correct to obey the law; it might be right to protest, or disobey. All lawyers know that the law is a blunt instrument, but the ethicist takes this into the practice of life.

Hilliary Clinton is not the first person to grapple with and bypass the machinery of the State Department. The State Department has a “cable” system, an automated distribution network named for the days when undersea Telex networks linked the embassies with D.C. As Henry Kissinger explains it, the automated nature of the system meant that a confidential communication could easily be routed by accident to many more desks than intended. Kissinger’s solution was to bypass it, and most of the State Department, for a diplomacy based in the White House. Clinton’s private server doubtless had a similar motivation.

To an “ethicist” like myself, the Clinton server is a tempest in a teapot.  But I can’t imagine a man who gropes women as president. That this is a voter’s choice indicates a very serious political disease that must be addressed in the next four years, or it will reoccur.

In Portrait of a Spaceman; Predictions for 2016, I predicted a Clinton win. The prediction stands. In the 2012 election, there was doubt that younger voters would turn out again for Obama. But their lack of polled enthusiasm turned out to be passive-aggression. They turned out on Election Day. And Comey’s disclosure is increasingly discounted, as the visceral offense of the other choice becomes starkly personal.

James Bamford writes (Reuters), “Commentary: Don’t be so sure Russia hacked the Clinton emails”.

Long  ago, I wrote one of the first three or so computer viruses. It had two parts, an injector, and a persistent payload. It had a good, helpful purpose, to extend the capability of a primitive operating system, in a time before “add-ons.” Amusingly, I was regarded as a wizard for about three weeks. Invoking mystery, it preceded what is now commonplace. Some of my other contributions may yet be floating around DoD, They will best remain nameless and unattributed.

I could write a profiling tool of the type used by the NSA, perhaps even a good one. At the most advanced level, it’s a black mathematical art. Without any compromise to national security, refer to a published Wikipedia article on entropy encoding, with this relevant paragraph:

Besides using entropy encoding as a way to compress digital data, an entropy encoder can also be used to measure the amount of similarity between streams of data and already existing classes of data. This is done by generating an entropy coder/compressor for each class of data; unknown data is then classified by feeding the uncompressed data to each compressor and seeing which compressor yields the highest compression. The coder with the best compression is probably the coder trained on the data that was most similar to the unknown data.

James Bamford probably does not have the mathematical background to understand the above. The finest legal education does not prepare for it. And it’s merely a pinch from the bag of NSA technology. It’s all secret. To disclose it is to lose it. Bamford’s rebuttal could be, I don’t need to understand it. Does he?

It’s not worth writing an article to denigrate James Bamford. The op-ed pages are inevitably populated by people whose writing is better than their thinking. And Bamford is a pretty decent thinker, which makes his article a suitable example for the educational mission of this blog. Really bad thinkers offer no educational examples.

Bamford’s article exemplifies a “thought system”-centric way of thinking. It’s as if  the article contains a hidden inclusion, a “my-thought-framework.h” header file, that brings in all the macro definitions (beliefs) and code libraries (schools of thought), without being explicit about it. Writers do not customarily precede their pieces with explicit declarations, but perhaps they should, with:

• “I’m going to talk to you as a politician”
• “I’m going to talk to you like a lawyer.”
• “I’m going to talk to you as a law enforcement official.”
• “I’m from the intelligence community, and this is what we’ve discovered as truthful from our perspective.

The only customary qualifiers are the disclaimer, as in, “I have no business interest/relationship…”, and the CV, the purpose of which is to make you more credulous than would the words by themselves.

Bamford’s education is legal. The legal perspective is crucially important to the national debate about surveillance and civil liberties. But with cyber warfare he encounters the problems of  patent litigation. How can a jury, or even a judge, grasp the technological intricacies of modern civilization, at a time when complexity  is running away from us? Technology creates knowledge inscrutable except to the specialist at ever-increasing rate. Change is speeding up. Our minds are not.

So the first points of meta-analysis are:

• Inevitably, there are things in Bamford’s article that he does not understand.
• The lack of understanding is disguised, probably unintentionally, by adherence to the habits of thought acquired in two activities. One of these is law school, which promotes rigor according to the frameworks of common law and statutory law.
• The other activity is investigative journalism and documentary, with its own ethos. Dig. Dig with a shovel if you have one, with your hands if you don’t. Don’t stay within your intellectual comfort zone.
• All documentaries have points of view. They are deliberately tendentious. If they are viewed with critical faculty, it’s good. If swallowed whole, it’s bad.

Quoting Bamford’s article,

On October 7, Clapper issued a statement: “The U.S. Intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” Notably, however, the FBI declined to join the chorus, according to reports by the New York Times and CNBC.

We now have three points of view, DNI (the intelligence community), FBI (legal), and Bamford’s which is investigative. Now we can do a little triangulation.

The FBI has a very good record with cases brought and convictions resulting. To the FBI, a case that does not result in conviction is an error, damaging to their reputation. This results from a fine appreciation of the elements that result in conviction:

• An impeccable chain of evidence.
• An understanding of how “beyond reasonable doubt” plays out in the minds of the judge and jury.
• The interaction of English common law, the living tradition of law, with the above.

Distilled to the  essence,  the FBI’s demurral results from the unfamiliarity of the legal system with profiling tools. Every new form of evidence becomes accepted by common law by first use and expert testimony. Fingerprints entered the canon on December 21, 1911. Colin Pitchfork was convicted of murder via DNA evidence in 1987.

Since the NSA’s profiling tools have not been inducted into common law by expert testimony at trial with resulting conviction, they cannot be used to bring a case in the U.S. legal system. And to put these tools, in all their individuality, under the public microscope of the courts, would be to lose them.

The rest of the article has the clarity of a window soaped on Mischief Night. It portrays something one might call the overall picture, with the insinuation that it is more important than the NSA’s profiling tools. The picture is portrayed as murky, confusing, contradictory, and uncertain.

It results from the mindset of human-oriented investigative journalism. Abuses of power, in law enforcement and politics, tend to have broad patterns,  miniature cultures, that muckraking can break wide open. It’s one of the most important traditions of the free world.  But it can’t uncover the games of dueling mathematicians/hackers.

It’s well written, entertaining, and inspires suspicion, in this case, of the critical judgment of authority figures. It’s the tendentious persuasion of the documentarian. It’s  digging, mainly with the hands.

The reader has a difficult choice of conclusions. One is James Clapper’s statement on October 7 of Russian culpability,  based on secret technology:

“The U.S. Intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.”

The other choice is Bamford’s scooping, palm by palm, forming a qualitative picture, heaping it by the side of the FBI demurral. This is conflation, the commingling of different types of reasoning. The demurral of the FBI, rooted in our legal system, has nothing to do with Bamford’s qualitative picture.

Bamford’s article has a headline question. In his attempt to suggest an answer, he paints a soapy window picture, with a suggested interpretation. Declining to accept, we’ve dissected the logic of the article. Let’s ask another question: Why did he write it?

• Bamford has figured importantly in the national debate about surveillance. I would expect his articles on the subject to be of high quality.
• His mindset is a combination of the legal and the  human-oriented, derived from the traditional tools of the political muckraker.
• His  title question is the Question of the Moment. But in proper consideration, Russian culpability is a completely technical question. Would you be interested in Bamford’s opinion as to why the SpaceX rocket blew up?
• The article inspires fear of rash action, which does a disservice to our (current) leadership. Have you noticed the Obama administration overreacting to anything?

The conclusion is that Bamford wanted to write another article. Every writer has the urge to publish. He recycled his tools, attitudes, and frameworks to attack a problem just outside his domain of expertise. He is  well attuned to the political process, but not to the guts of cyber warfare.

This is not a good article. I look forward to Bamford’s future contributions on the politics of surveillance, when he does his best work.

According to Reuters, U.S. General Curtis Scaparrotti  told defense ministers that Russia was seeking, in military parlance, “escalation dominance,” according to people briefed on the discussions.

This is a reasonable assertion. But Britain’s ambassador to NATO Adam Thomson is quoted as saying, “It is obviously trying to signal but it is not clear that we know how to understand those signals.”

Scaparotti’s assertion is reasonable because Putin and his planners, like western planners, gravitate towards formal thought frameworks. But also like western thinkers, the formalities are impositions on instinctive thought patterns. Without the genes of conflict, there would be no conflict. When is the last time you saw two palm trees shooting at each other?

The roots of the current escalation of tensions are memorable. Some  Russian speaking knuckle-draggers (apes), took it upon themselves to “rescue” the eastern Russian speaking provinces of Ukraine from the evil Ukrainians of Kiev, whose sins were significant, but not of the mortal variety.

Within Russia, there was widespread support for the knuckle-dragging nationalists leading to a surge of Anschluss sentiment. There was even one supporting preauthored white paper, though the Kremlin denies it was theirs. After some weeks of temporizing, Putin’s choices were difficult: to harness this sentiment in support of his political machine, or oppose it. He apparently judged he was not strong enough to survive the latter course. He saw opportunity as well, but it’s a fine point.

The EU and the U.S. responded with sanctions at which the Russians originally scoffed. Perhaps they thought the Chinese would replace that West. It now appears that the Chinese have noticed two things:

• In contrast to China’s drive against corruption, Putin’s state relies on strategies that, according to the revised Chinese standard of behavior, constitute corruption. Unlike China, Russia is not evolving  towards a Confucian version of Plato’s Republic.
• While China is still a place of arbitrary detention, it is still a relatively safe place to do business.

The Fortune article How the KGB (and friends) took over Russia’s economy (Last Updated: September 10, 2008: 8:42 AM EDT  ) describes  the strong-arming of B.P, for which there is no comparable China story:

Consider the case of BP (BP), which thought its partnership with a group of Russian billionaires, TNK-BP, was a textbook joint venture. Instead, the British oil company finds itself under attack: Its Russia-based employees have been hit with dubious charges of industrial espionage, the CFO of the venture recently stepped down, and the CEO has publicly complained of “sustained harassment of the company and myself” by Russian authorities. Industry analysts believe they’ve seen this scenario before – last year Royal Dutch Shell (RDS-B) was forced to cede control over its Sakhalin oilfield to Russian companies (see “Shell Shakedown”) – and predict BP will eventually pull out in frustration, followed by a state-controlled energy giant taking over the business.

The result of all this, and Russia’s military posturing, is that, among  the most advanced countries in world, Russia is a pariah. Vladimir Putin could not have planned this. But from his upbringing, he is susceptible to the notion of cultural superiority. Searching for a new Russian ethos to replace communism, he happened to imagine the solution in a throwback to the time of the Tsars.

What Adam Thomson refers to are not signals, except in a very crude sense, explained best by the telling of an old Soviet joke:

A poor peasant lives with his family in a one-room hut. His only possessions are a horse, a cow, and and a pig. He asks the commissar for permission to add a room to the hut. The commissar orders him, “Take the cow into your hut and live with it!” After a week, the peasant entreats the commissar, “It is even worse with the cow in my small space. May I please enlarge my hut?” The commissar then orders, “Take the pig into your hut and live with it!” After another week, the peasant is going out of his mind. He asks the commissar again, “May I please enlarge my hut a little bit? There is no room to move.” The commissar sternly orders the peasant to take the horse into his hut. After a third week, the peasant has become a raving lunatic, but he gasps out one final request. The commissar replies, “You may take the animals out of your hut.” The peasant throws himself on the ground and cries, “Thank you, thank you!”

By  being incredibly nasty, the West will thank the Russians for any kindness that may be forthcoming.

Putin is an intelligent man, but few are the figures of history who successfully crafted a civilization, or even a national culture. The man has overreached. The other day, I had an enjoyable discussion with an intelligent German, who offered two opinions:

• The West mistreated Russia in the Glasnost period.
• Putin is bad, and has to be stopped. Otherwise, he asked, when will it stop?

The German’s two opinions are not contradictory. We can neither blame ourselves for creating a monster, or give ourselves a pass. Neither can we vilify Vladimir Putin for his attempt to found a modern state with a foundation of nothing modern.  But the time for admiration is past. The problem is bigger than he is, and I don’t mean it as a denigration. It’s a very big problem.

The  error of Putin’s Russia, possibly encouraged by some western actions, is to make the problem of Russia a version of the map-coloring problem. On a political map, how, using a limited number of inks, can the entities be colored so that no two adjacent have the same color? How can Russia’s internal stability be favored by cross-border tensions? The notion that internal stability is favored by neighborly relations is a modern, western notion. Post 2008, it is not a Russian concept.

Adam Thomson, and policy wonks in general, think of the “Russian signals problem” in terms of the SETI decoding of signals of an advanced civilization. But it involves dressing up  instinctive behavior with unjustified complexity, when an amoeba might suffice. The Reuters article refers to the Moscow troop concentration:

NATO says its decision to send 4,000 troops, planes, tanks and artillery to former Soviet republics in the Baltics and to Poland next year is a measured response compared to what NATO believes are 330,000 Russian troops amassed near Moscow.

They are around Moscow because that is where they can be seen, reinforcing domestic paranoia, and incidentally, to fend off Chechens, revolutionaries, nationalists, and the like.

Now that Putin’s Russia has converted national survival into a version of the map coloring problem, we’re stuck with a new version of Containment. But Putin won’t live forever. His RS-28 missiles, fueled by very dangerous chemicals, will rust or explode in their silos. Vigilance and patience are justified.

But let’s not try very hard to interpret Russian “signals.” If I were a Russian, I would want the West to believe that they exist. For the meaning, such as it is, refer to the joke.

CNN: “The warhead will weigh 100 tons…”

It’s tragic when a news outlet considers musical scoring of their “news” more important than accuracy. The last time I flagged CNN, it was in CNN and Yellow Journalism, “U.S. bomber flies over DMZ” In their endless quest for shock value, CNN have done it again.

Super heavy lift missiles exist, but the RS-28 is not one of them. The 100 tons referred to is the gross weight of the missile, not the warhead. The maximum payload, the combined weight of all the warheads it can carry, is about 10 tons.

It was already possible for Russia to destroy the U.S., and the U.S. possesses reciprocal capability. The strategy is called MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), and it is very old news. The greatest value of the new missile is in the inducement of irrational fear. CNN, in their quest for fear-driven readership, serves the Russian cause admirably. Of course, it helps when a weapon is named “Satan.” It’s just in time for Halloween.

Some points to consider:

• The U.S. has never had the capability to defend against a Russian missile strike, nor does Russia have the capability. Hence the ability of the new Russian missile to evade U.S. defenses is meaningless.
• The destructive power of a nuclear warhead increases by a small (exponent < 1) fraction of a size increase. For this reason, the U.S. has emphasized smaller, more accurate warheads. They work better.
• DoD experts have studied the problem of deterrence for decades. The problem is well under control.
• The real fear is on the part of the Russians. There is no such thing as a strategic arms race without the participation of both parties. I suggest we let it remain a Russian preoccupation.

The RS-28 is described as liquid fueled. In military use, for prompt launch time, the use of hypergolic propellants is required. Quoting The Register,

Further tech details are not forthcoming, although it’s assumed the RS-28s will use the same RD-274 engine cluster (4 x RD-273 units) burning a hypergolic mix of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and N₂O₄ (nitrogen textroxide) that lift the R-36M2 Voevoda. The advantage of this system is that the fuel components are comparatively easy to store over long periods, as opposed to cryogenic fuels.

These chemicals, identical to the propellants of the retired U.S. Titan II,  are lethally poisonous, corrosive to the rocket, and tend towards explosions.  In 1965, a Titan II complex fire killed 53.  A 1980 Arkansas explosion resulted in one fatality, but destroyed the launch complex and blew the nuclear warhead 100 feet. This is why the U.S. nuclear arsenal includes no liquid fueled rockets such as the Russian Satan.  NASA’s advice here. The rocket may be more dangerous to the Russians than anybody else.

CNN, there is absolutely no excuse for this. None, nada!

The focus of this blog has been kept fairly narrow, so that the reader has a reasonable expectation before spending a valuable click. I broke the rule egregiously with a five part Address to Davos, a consideration of the period spanning the near future to 2038.  I broke even more egregiously with Why Russia Hacked the DNC; In Defense of Liberty, which is in effect an endorsement of the Democratic candidate. I would hope that this blog gives the impression of a thoughtful voter. In past elections, I’ve paid scant attention to party lines.

With the elephant and donkey rampaging through the china shop in place of the bear, it’s opportune to break the rule again. The theme of bite size posts will have to do with the electoral misrepresentation, or at least obscuration, of the issues affecting the U.S. position in the world. It is not a partisan sin. It results from strenuous attempts to reconcile, in a way the electorate would understand, the every-man desire for prosperity against the benefits and costs of relations with the external world that every-man benefits from  or pays for.

If you’re fond of hyper-dimensional geometry, draw a 6-dimensional cube on your Riemann tablecloth, and label the axis:

• Hard power.
• Soft power.
• Globalization.
•  Competition of economic systems (state sponsored capitalism versus laissez-faire capitalism.)
• Moral idealizations.
• Human development.

(I’ll have six-dimensional notepads in the website store for a million bucks a pop, as soon as the flying saucer drops them off. )

The first thing to consider is whether these axis truly independent. Can they be reduced to a fewer number by interdependence? Everything has costs.

To be continued shortly.

In Battle of Ramadi, ongoing, the high water mark of ISIS, from 11/22/2014, I wrote,

ISIS will fail. This, even more than Kobani, will be known as the  “high water mark” of ISIS. Some may recall this phrase from the history of the U.S. Civil War, of Longstreet’s assault into the Union lines, at the Battle of Gettysburg, on July 3, 1863. This is of that magnitude.

 The argument weakened when Ramadi fell to ISIS in May of 2015. But significance remained, in the replacement of the myth of an unstoppable ISIS by reasonable chance of valorous success. In building the myth that supports a national army, the two battles of Ramadi and the recapture in December 2015 stand with the early battles of the U.S. in the Pacific Theater in World War II.

In Child Psychology, Iraq, ISIS, Tipping Point, Holy Grail, published 11/29/2014, I developed logic to support the rapid collapse of ISIS:

Put into the fewest possible words, with an implied reference of Western culture, the combatants exhibit labile affect. This is a useful result. It implies that, when the tipping point occurs, the collapse of ISIS, as an organized entity, will be as rapid as their ascent.

In Portrait of a Spaceman; Predictions for 2016, I used this assessment to predict

• Mosul will be taken on schedule. The Obama Administration is now fully engaged with the problem of ISIS.

It appears that the actual date is likely to fall between the early aspirations of the Iraq government, and the more pessimistic estimates of military and intelligence professionals, who tended towards the view that the operation could not even be mounted in 2016. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide where my prediction falls on the scale of accuracy.

If my prediction has value, it is of the quintessential open-source, intuitive kind, discovered by Philip Tetlock in research dating back more than 20 years. Why it is possible for some individuals to compete successfully against expert knowledge hasn’t been nailed down. But it is likely that the human mind tends toward capture by the systems of thought with which it is most familiar. The various sides of the ISIL conflict, and the broader one which includes Syria as well, place emphasis on the things they feel intimately familiar with, and underweight the rest:

• The Iraqi government forces, until recently, counted paper orders of battle and uniform decorations. Characteristic of undeveloped societies, this kind of assessment is biased towards failure.
• The U.S. counts training , discipline, logistics, and alliances, without, perhaps, understanding that these characteristics can stem only from an overarching social order of a broader society. The failures of this type of analysis have been  both sides of the coin.
• The ISIS adherents count “faith”, a manipulation of psychological state without understanding why or how. With no factual basis, it relies on emotional domination of the opponent. This is the justification of prediction of a rapid collapse.
• They all count bullets, because the bullet is a simple thing, an extension of personal assault to a few thousand feet.

IARPA would prefer not to rely on oracles, particularly the unexplained kind, for prediction. In the mind of each “super forecaster“, there are unexplained methods for combination and weighting of the modalities of the above list.

What are they?