(The Hill) Rudy Giuliani quips he has ‘insurance’ if Trump throws him ‘under the bus’.

Continuing from Rudy Guliani & The Penguin, what could his insurance plan be? Who are “the first-born sons of Gotham City” ?

The Penguin’s Plan Scene

(NY Times) Fourth Spy Unearthed in U.S. Atomic Bomb Project.

The CIA research article has no paywall: (PDF) On the Trail of a Fourth Soviet Spy at Los Alamos. The central figure, with Soviet code name “Godsend”, is Oscar Soberer, who attended the City College of New York, studied electrical engineering and worked at Los Alamos from 1944 to 1946. Quoting the Times,

“The bureau’s information about the defector had come from infiltrators of the Communist Party of the United States, and the bureau worried about their possible exposure. The name of the undercover operation was Solo.”

Coauthor Haynes of the CIA paper remarks (NY Times),

“In an interview, Mr. Haynes, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M., near Los Alamos, said he hoped that new files released in the future under FOIA to the scholars would ‘fill in a whole bunch of gaps.” The F.B.I., he added, “takes its own good time in these matters.'”

This is the background of the historians’ efforts, hindered by incomplete documentation, withheld to protect informants who may be still alive. This spy revelation is in the class of curiosities. It’s unlikely to affect the future, yet it’s an opportunity to compare how different systems of thought can apply to the same problem.

As a “mystery”, it resembles “Who killed Dag Hammarskjöld ?”  Whether you consider it a mystery depends upon the criteria for a solution. It’s very clear  who killed him;  accomplices vary from clear to vague; the problem of legal proof is bundling all the dead witnesses into the hearing room to depose in their final repose.

The solution to a mystery borrows from the legal tradition of courtroom truth: So-and-so saw it, so-and-so says it to the court. This is so fundamentally stringent, even one additional link in this short chain is excluded as hearsay.

Change was forced in the form of “technological hearsay”, the admission of  forms of indirect, technology based evidence,  with the testimony of the expert who is not an actual witness to the crime. Fingerprinting was used 1892 and 1897, followed by all manners of technology and pathology  for crime reconstruction.   DNA profiling, admitted to court in 1988, recently advanced to a new level of indirect evidence with family tree forensics.

We can apply  indirect, technical analysis to the  main question of historians Klehr and  Haynes, which is, what information did Godsend give the Soviets?  Though our hypothesis does not satisfy legal norms,  it approaches admissible circumstantial evidence, on which murder convictions have been obtained.

Our functional, technological approach is hard for non-techies, i.e. historians, to execute.  It could sharpen the attention while sifting voluminous, musty archives. So let’s do it.

The next post will develop a coherent picture of what Godsend could do, the history of his employment with the Manhattan Project, and what he probably was doing at both Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. The search space is much smaller than you might imagine, and it’s all open source.

You’ve got some reading to do: On the Trail of a Fourth Soviet Spy at Los Alamos. Read as much as you like about mass spectrometers. I’ll provide the easy explanation.

To be continued shortly.

This is a reprint of an article series on Fiona Hill, written upon her appointment. If you’re in a hurry,  only the first article is specifically about Dr. Hill. The rest of the series is about our mutual interest:

• Fiona Hill, Trump’s Putin Advisor.
• Fiona Hill, Putin’s Apology; Analysis Part 2
• Fiona Hill, Putin’s Apology; Analysis Part 3.
• Fiona Hill, Putin’s KGB; Part 4
• Fiona Hill, Putin’s Apology; Analysis Part 4; KGB Culture

(CNN) The flat-Earth conspiracy is spreading around the globe. Does it hide a darker core?

Yes, it does. There is no conspiracy to hide a “flat earth”, but the spread of this nonsense illuminates a weakness of common reason, suggesting that democracies can never be as pure as they aspire. It has implications for politics.

“Flat Earth” shouldn’t be shocking, since most people spend their lives believing doubtful things because it gives them comfort, or reduces the need for thought — or booze. Every society gives license to believe certain doubtful things, while proscribing others. But  this is technical, when we thought that science had triumphantly chased primitive beliefs into the shadows.

I was riding a New Jersey Transit train to the Apple, when I heard a rider  who sounded professional ask a companion (paraphrasing), “Does anybody really understand how the world works? Like how this train works?”  I compared her view of the situation to my own. I understood in considerable detail how and why our Arrow Multi-Unit car was moving down the tracks.

I understand the   car-body alloys, the wheel trucks, the IGBT transistors in the electric inverters,  the VVVF drive traction motors, the microprocessors that control things, the distant power plants that convert kinetic energy into electricity. And then my understanding  hits a roadblock, until I switch modes, to the abstract.

Magnetism, key to generating electricity, is so fundamental, it isn’t made of stuff. A theory of physics, QED for short, predicts magnetism and how it behaves.  If magnetism behaved in any other way, our universe would not exist in the form that it does.  So when I think about magnetism, I’m required to shed my naive view of the material world and place my trust in a symbol system, with has very complicated equations that predict things that are beyond the ken of all but specialists — or anybody.

When I was a small child,  I asked my pop why magnets work. He got a little frustrated with his inability. I did not understand that my question was impossible to answer. If he could have explained, I would not have understood.  Child psychologist Jean Piaget  described four stages of mental development. The last two (Wikipedia) are (ellipsis mine):

3. Concrete operational stage: from ages seven to eleven. Children can now conserve and think logically (they understand reversibility)…

4. Formal operational stage: from age eleven to sixteen and onwards (development of abstract reasoning). … Abstract thought is newly present during this stage of development. Children are now able to think abstractly…display more skills oriented towards problem solving, often in multiple steps.

Puzzlement is unpleasant. Some of the passenger’s angst could be alleviated by concrete comparisons with things she knows. Other answers are completely formal. Physics blogs are inundated by (Ask the Van, U. of Illinois, Urbana) demands to know what magnetic fields are made of. The answer is, it’s the wrong question. It requires a level of mastery of formal operations that most people never attain.

The puzzled passenger might get a satisfied feeling if I compared the alloys in the train to stainless steel tableware, with which she has tactile familiarity.  With magnetism, the best I could do would be to call it an essence, and hope she finds essences satisfying.

In comparison, Round Earth is high school simplicity. Flat earthers have not developed significant skill at formal operations, particularly in the subjects of  high school trigonometry and physics. They lack intuition, which can sometimes substitute. They distrust those who have these skills. Most damning, they don’t know what they don’t know.

The Age of Reason was supposed to herald the end of baloney.  Why Flat Earth, Now? What are the consequences for politics?

To be  continued, when “news conditions” permit.

This blog has a following in Hong Kong, so it’s worth underlining what may be obvious to international readers, and readers in the mainland.

China to Seize Hong Kong Airport? identifies the airport as a target of opportunity. Exactly the same reasoning applies to the occupation of universities, as a concentration of the elements the mainland considers most dangerous. See also Danger: Will China Deploy Troops in Hong Kong?

In other cases involving human rights, such as the internment of Uighurs, International pressure of China has had no results. Only in cases involving leniency for the  individual dissident has there been an occasional effect.

Today, Hong Kong is the fulcrum of a scale with two heavy weights. One side of the scale is the absolute domination of the China police state, an amplification of Confucian ideas of government. The other side is a bridge or welcome-mat to the West. As China has developed internally, with business law systems quasi-compatible with the West, this rationale for “one country two systems” has diminished importance. The residents of Hong Kong hardly count in the balance of this scale.

Democracy is a popular idea  everywhere in China. This is why the challenge of Hong Kong, on the doorstep to the mainland, is dangerous to the rule of the Communist Party, an opaque consensus of an elite.

There have been requests from some protestors for international help. Actually, you are getting some already, but help can come only in the form of negatives, like business disengagement. The more visible the crackdown, the more negative the business climate of China. In awareness of this, the mainland may choose a slow-motion, invisible crackdown, spreading secret arrests over many years.

I feel sorry for all of you, who had the misfortune to be born in the wrong country for your aspirations. Here, you would be doing great things.

Since this blog is tailored to the high end, readers of officialdom hide behind the proxies/firewalls of their organizations. But there is one group that lets it all hang out — spammers.  Today’s haul is almost a good read. To avoid giving them a search engine boost, their names have been deliberately munged:

From “porn motive“,

Hello, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was juset curious if you get a lot of spam responses? If so how do you stop it, any plugin orr anything you can recommend? I get so much lately it’s driving me crazy so any support is very much appreciated.

From “best curlers on the wave“,

Now I am goinjg away to do mmy breakfast,when having my breakfast coming over again to read furter news.

From “frogleap”,

I am sure this paragraph has touched all the internet users, its really really fastidious paragraph on building up new webpage.

From “decor“,

Yes! Finally someone writes about furniture.

“Decor”, I am truly touched, that someone recognizes my skill at predicting furniture.  So here’s my prediction:

Divans are in. Ottomans are out.

(CNN) Deadly school shooting in Santa Clarita.

Previous articles:

• Texas School Shootings; the Right to Kill
• Violence in America Part 1
• Violence in America Part 2; Two Degrees of Anonymity

Violence, Part 1 asserts the meaninglessness of mental health criteria to the discussion. Violence, Part 2, accuses the “avatar”, the fictitious web identity, that in some users results in diminished responsibility. This Part 3 is about moral education.

The future history of mankind will have a new great divide: before social media, and after. Before social media, lurid tales of mayhem were told, but in the third person. The jail house interview was rare and thin.  With social media, the tales are told in the first person, usually before the event.

The telling of a story of murder,  in the first person, is psychically richer than the best reportorial prose. I doubt Tom Wolfe could have matched it if he so desired. Even the best murder mysteries lack the bite of the deranged young male exposing a piece of his mental disease.

Now, it’s out there. In the coming days, the killer’s mutterings may be discovered on social media, feeding imperceptibly into the subterranean zeitgeist. Many thinkers have toyed with the idea of the group mind, but who could have imagined that its expressions would be so lethal?

As per Part 2, the susceptible population of young men may be as high as 2.5%, corresponding to the prevalence of psychotics in the general population.  Gun control and prevention of concealment by avatar have been proposed. This is probably not enough.

Some, like Attorney General William Barr, advocate weakening of the separation of church and state. Quoting from (AU) Seeking God’s Law: Past Statements By Attorney General Nominee William Barr Are Cause For Concern, Americans United Says. 

“Because human nature is fallen, we will not automatically conform ourselves to God’s law, but because we can know what is good … we are not doomed to be slaves in our passions and wants,” Barr told the group. “To the extent that a society’s moral culture is based on God’s law, it will guide men toward the best possible life.”

Mr. Barr, I’m not Catholic. I don’t believe in “fallen” humans.  And you seem to forget the horrors of history. Spain committed genocide in Holland in the name of religion. New World aboriginals were enslaved in the name of religion. Most wars have at least some religious element, as does the current War on Terror, or whatever you want to call it.

So I don’t  hold with that. But liberals do have something to prove, that liberal values are compatible with moral teaching, which liberal dictum does not by itself supply.

Refer to (pdf) Recent Violent Crime Trends in the United States, Figure 2, “National Homicide Rate, 1960-2016”.  Superimpose on the chart the Oprah Winfrey show, which ran from September 8, 1986, to May 25, 2011.

This proves (you get the joke) that Oprah Winfrey’s show was a great moral teacher, all the while masquerading as entertainment. Good mothers make good kids. Television, long a moral vacuum, became the accidental pulpit of good.

If TV can be “moralized”, how about social media? As the offspring of liberal culture, it was conceived to be morally absent. Is there something that could be done to change absent to morally present?

Robot mentors?

As time goes by, Rudy Giuliani, mayor of Gotham from 1994-2001, is developing a visual resemblance to Gotham’s greatest nemesis, The Penguin. And both are politicians. Compare:

Rudy (image) versus The Penguin (image).

Quoting from the Wikipedia character “book”,

The Penguin’s wealth gives him access to better resources than most other Batman villains, and he is able to mix with Gotham’s elite, especially those he plans to target in his future crimes. He is also capable of returning to his luxurious lifestyle very easily despite his violent criminal history and prison record. He has even attempted multiple times to enter the political world, even launching expensive election campaigns.

As mayor, Rudy cleaned up the city, ridding it of nuisances such as  turnstile jumpers and street musicians. Although, I confess, I liked street musicians, and just about anybody you wouldn’t pay to stop blowing. So let’s hope Time doesn’t carry this too far. For the sake of justice, should Rudy end up in court, potential jurors should be disqualified if they’ve ever seen a Batman flick.

(YouTube) Running for mayor, the same office Rudy held, Penguin meets his political consultants.

Will China Deploy Troops in Hong Kong ? posits  criteria for deployment of the hammer. Two of them have now been met:

• • Organizing efforts by civil servants, bringing political form to an amorphous movement.
  • Absent overt indications such as the above, concessions by Carrie Lam, that instead of diminishing the protests, result in escalated demands, contain the implied trigger for intervention.

(Reuters) Hong Kong official chides civil servants joining protests, satisfies the first element. In Beijing’s eyes, it risks establishment of a shadow government. A single concession was made,  the scrapping of the extradition bill, to no apparent effect.  The protestors have coalesced around the Five Demands. From (youngpost) Hong Kong protests: What are the ‘five demands’? What do protesters want?,

• Full withdrawal of the extradition bill.
• A commission of inquiry into alleged police brutality.
• Retracting the classification of protesters as “rioters”.
• Amnesty for arrested protesters.
• Dual universal suffrage, meaning for both the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive.

Other inducements run true to the China foreign policy tradition of a millennia, soft power. Had economic betterment of this highly educated and highly stressed population already occurred,  they might have been too complaisant  to risk their lives. Beijing may now have reasoned that for economic inducements to be effective, Hong Kong must have conducive public order.

To Beijing, events imply, If we wait, it will get worse, with the defection of civil servants risking a colour revolution. Hence, preparation: (Reuters) China quietly doubles troop levels in Hong Kong, envoys say.

There is one holdup: the plan. How can an action be surgical, when the protestors have themselves applied fairly sophisticated strategies to minimize the concept of “leadership” and replace predictability with randomness? The protestors wear masks, but this is effective only against a normal police state with limited manpower. China has, practically speaking, unlimited manpower.

Somewhere on the mainland, there are rooms with thousands of watchers, staring at video feeds, correlating appearances of masked figures the old way, attempting what AI probably cannot yet do.  With infinite patience, they catalog what they watch, aided by custom database programming and a little AI spice.

An historical example illuminates. In 1939, Ukraine harbored a pro-West and rather fascist insurgency led by Stepan Bandera.  Like Hezbollah today, the insurgency had its own counterintelligence operation. It  successfully identified Soviet  NKVD safe houses, where informants to the NKVD could meet with their handlers. How did they do it?

There were no surveillance cameras back then. Soviet NKVD agents wore standard issue high boots when in uniform. Western Ukrainians wore short boots. The Soviets forgot to change into short boots when they donned plain clothes. Sudoplatov, page 105.

They were given away by their shoes. Cataloging shoes and other articles of clothing, matching these to other biometrics and places of residence, reducing errors by cross-correlation — all this takes time. But Beijing figures they have only one chance to do it right. Space for the detained is not a problem. There is plenty of that in Xinjiang.

I feel sorry for the protestors. With so much idealism, dignity, and intelligence, they would honor the Athens of Pericles.

Reuters: U.S. withholding $105 million in security aid for Lebanon; Night Vision Goggles; Vox Populi concludes:

So we have a plausible explanation for the decision to deny aid, a conflict between State and the Pentagon. A short argument suggests that the aid is insufficient to prevent the intrusion of Russian influence.

(NY Times) White House Freezes Military Aid to Lebanon, Against Wishes of Congress, State Dept. and Pentagon contradicts this with factual authority. The NSC decision process that resulted in Lebanon aid cancellation, with  apparent objection by State and Defense, remains unexplained. The article echoes widespread suspicion of something like the Ukraine holdup. Quoting,

Though the president has denied it, senior administration officials have testified that there was indeed a quid pro quo, and the top American diplomat in Ukraine said he sent a cable telling Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that it was “folly” to withhold the aid.

This has become an open-source question of more than average interest.  The question of the hour is whether the  Lebanon aid cutoff is the result of

• Improper intrusion of politics, or something illicit.
• Proper, but ill advised decision making.
• A process that takes due measure of the concerns of the principals, though lacking broad consensus. With the opposition of State and Defense, it can’t be broad.

The NSC principals with the most at stake are the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security,  the Director of National Intelligence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Homeland Security Advisor. But the White House Chief of Staff, who is not a direct stakeholder, and the Homeland Security Advisor are most susceptible to pressure external to the deliberations of the NSC.

It is not impossible that Trump, acting through the White House Chief of Staff, dictated the cutoff. There is a significant and influential minority opinion,  prioritizing the danger of indirect aid to Hezbollah.  This would explain a decision that seems to lack consensus from the majority of stakeholders.

Receipt of new information is also possible. Such information could be in powerful opposition to personal links that have been established by State and Defense with their peers in Lebanon.

I’m not going to spell this one out. Those who have read this blog for a while, and have taken a shine to the craft of open source intelligence, may independently derive it. It will remain unstated, for reasons more important than writing an interesting article.