Monthly Archives: July 2021

AI

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J. Tangredi and G. Galdorisi, eds., AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning Are Changing Naval Warfare, Annapolis, Md, Naval Institute Press, 2021.

The book, which I got in hard copy from a friend, was written by a team of experts, all of whom have years of experience with computers, cyberwar, AI, the US Navy, or all four of those. Such being the case, I was hardly surprised to find it overflowing with praise (interspersed with a few warnings, what’s true is true) for everything that has to do with computers. What huge memories they have, incomparably larger and more easily accessible than those of the most capable humans. How fast they can process information and, thanks to the data links that connect them, pass it to the ends of the universe (and perhaps beyond, but let’s not enter into that here). How sophisticated their programs, specifically including AI, have become, enabling them to “see” a thousand connections that would probably have escaped humans even if they spent a thousand years looking for them. How modern warfare (and a thousand other things) would be inconceivable without them.

How dangerous it would be to allow America’s rivals to leapfrog it in this critically important field. Above all, what marvelous things computers and AI may still be expected to do in the future. How, though unable to replace humans, they can greatly enhance their capabilities. Provided some remaining fundamental problems (such as the difficulty they have in adapting to change and the vast surplus of information they generate) are solved, of course; and provided the necessary funding is made available. All this, against a background of naval, and by no means only naval, warfare that is becoming steadily faster and more complex.

I would be the last person in the world to even try and dispute all this. After all, who can argue with sentences such as the following? “For this modest shift in force design to yield the most benefit, DoD needs to co-develop C2 processes that can operate a more disaggregated force and to pursue a new innovation strategy that focuses less on gaps in the ability of today’s force to operate as desired and more on how the future could perform better with new capabilities that may create novel ways of operating (Harrison Schramm and Bryan Clark, p. 240).” “An important benefit of using machine control is that it enables C2 architectures to adapt to communications availability, rather than DoD having to invest in robust communication infrastructure to support a ‘one sizer fits all’ C2 hierarchy” (same authors, p. 241). And who cares that “the term ‘all domain’ has started to replace the US Army ‘multiple-domain warfare’ term. First use appears to be Jim Garamose, “US military Must Develop AI-domain Defenses, Mattis, Dunford say,’ US Department of Defense, April 132, 2018, htppsw//www.defense.gov/Newsroom./News/Article/Article1493209-us-military-must-develop all-domain-defenses-mattis-dunford-say” (Adam M. Aycock and William G. Glenney, IV p. 283).
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Not I. Nor, I suspect, anyone who is not a member, bona fide or otherwise, of the community which specializes in such things. All this might have convinced me to snap to attention and salute in face of the avalanche of expertise –the “select bibliography” alone amounts to forty pages—the authors have hurled at me. If I did not do so, though, then that was partly because of the following incident. I got my first inkling that the book, which had been sent to me by snail mail, had arrived here in my neighborhood when I found a computer-printed note in my mailbox saying that I should come and collect it from the nearby post office. However, I knew I could not do so immediately; here in Israel it is customary for the Postal Service to give you your letters and parcels not on the day you are notified but on the next one. However, this was a Thursday. Since the Israeli weekend starts on Friday and lasts through Saturday, doing so had to wait until Sunday. Sunday morning I went to the office, only to learn that, to send a letter or parcel, you now have to make an appointment in advance (by handy and application, of course). As a result a number of people, mostly elderly ones like myself, were milling about looking embarrassed, not knowing what to do and how to do it. A few, asking the overburdened staff for help but not getting it, were close to tears.

Fortunately I was there to receive an item, not to send it. This time there was no need for a handy. I handed in my note, typed my ID number into a little gadget they keep for the purpose, and prepared to sign my name onto the screen when I realized that the attached electronic pencil was missing; perhaps someone, overtaken by computer rage, had deliberately torn it away. So instead I used my finger—not to make a print, which the machine was unable to “understand,” but simply to leave some kind of mark—an X, as it happened. Much like the ones illiterates of all ages have always used and still use.

I suppose I was lucky. They let me have the book, which as is almost always the case with the Naval Institute turned out to be not only crammed with information but well and solidly produced. Not having to go home and visit the post office again—good!

In and out of the Start Up Nation, my experience may be unique. Or is it?

Guest Article: God’s Fifth Column

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By

William S. Lind*

In the 1930s, a minor British novelist started writing a new book, which was not a novel. Instead, William Gerhardie proposed a theory of history he called “God’s Fifth Column,” which was also his book’s title. His theory was that, just at the point where everyone who was anyone agreed events would go in a certain direction, they instead headed off on a wild, wholly unpredicted tangent.

Gerhardie was inspired by the events of 1914 and their catastrophic consequences, in which we are still enmeshed. Prior to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s ill-timed trip to Sarajevo—the head of Serbian military intelligence had multiple assassins positioned there—the elite consensus was that another great European war simply was not possible. All the powers’ economies were too intertwined. International trade was essential. Everyone’s stock market would collapse, banks would fail, there would be riots in the streets. Within Europe, the labor market was international; one German soldier taken early in the war said to his British captors, “I hope this is over soon so I can get back to my job driving a cab in Liverpool.” But war came anyway, though no one wanted it, or, afterward, could explain why it had been fought. And the Christian West died in the mud of Flanders and Galicia.

If we look at our present situation through the lens of Gerhardie’s God’s Fifth Column, what do we see? Across the board, we find elite consensus on the stability and linear progression of a wide variety of things that are, in reality, unstable and uncertain. One of the most blatant is agreement that the U.S. government can print and spend as much money as it wants to with no need for concern about mounting debt, inflation, or a loss of faith in the dollar. The Biden administration has spent or plans to spend at least $6 trillion, with more to come. Trillions are now ho-hum; are quadrillions next? They call it “modern monetary theory,” but there is nothing modern about it. It has been tried before, more than once, with uniform unfortunate consequences. What does a wild tangent in the dollar’s progression look like?

Similarly, the United States stands athwart the world as the ultimate Superpower, its fingers in every eye as it dictates not just foreign but also domestic policy to everyone else. But it resembles less the colossus of Rhodes than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It loses all its wars, its armed services are warped by feminism and led by bureaucrats, and it is being ripped apart internally by its elites’ efforts to force an alien ideology, cultural Marxism, on its resentful people. Again, what does a radical re-direction look like?

Nor is it just in matters of government that we see unjustified consensus on future directions. Every car company in the world is betting its future on electrics. But where is all that electricity to come from, especially as the same people who crusade against internal combustion engines oppose every means of generating power? Wall Street rewards companies that focus on short-term cost-cutting, but how robust are the world-wide supply chains that requires? (We just saw a mini-God’s Fifth Column there.) The prices of almost every class of asset, except the one that has stood the test of time, gold, are reaching for the heavens, but do bubbles expand forever? And what happens when this one bursts, in a country now held together only by a false prosperity?

As an historian, I think Gerhardie’s theory is spot-on. Just at the point where everyone knows where events are going, they don’t. We’ve seen it over and over. But why does it happen?

There are several explanations, less for the effect itself than for the unjustified consensus that precedes it, and makes change seem radical and shocking. First and foremost is that people love prediction. Prediction, in turn, is almost always linear because otherwise it has no basis. It becomes just a hunch or a guess. To dress it up in respectable clothes and have it play Eliza Doolittle, it has to speak with an accustomed voice, which is to say it must predict more of the same.
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Second is the fact that ideas, like everything else, are swayed by fashion. Fashion, in turn, reflects a consensus, and those who break: from the consensus are taking a risk. That risk can bring damage to careers, incomes, and social life: look at the fates of those who have been “canceled” for opposing the fashionable ideology.

A third factor is the immense costs sunk in business as usual. Radical change makes massive investments useless or counterproductive. There is no better example than the vast sums spent before World War I and again between the wars on battleships. Except for one indecisive battle between the British and German fleets, Jutland in 1916, everybody’s dreadnoughts spent that war swinging ’round the anchor chain, and the Second World War at sea was decided by aircraft and submarines. The money spent on battleships would have brought better results had it all been used to buy diplomats more champagne.

Unlike in 1914, the advent of God’s Fifth Column in our time may not be bad news for conservatives. The “inevitable” future anticipated by the elites is a hellish combination of an absurd ideology, cultural Marxism (currently disguised as “wokeness”) with Brave New World. As Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness … fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.

What’s really around the corner is God’s Fifth Column, and it will knock both “wokeness” and Brave New World out of the park.

 

* William S. Lind is the author, with Lt. Col. Gregory A. Thiele, of the 4th Generation Warfare Handbook. Lind’s most recent book is Retroculture: Taking America Back, This article was first published in the July/August 2021 issue of The American Conservative.

 

How those Things Were Handled

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Today, for a woman who has been sexually harassed to be deeply, deeply traumatized has become almost obligatory. If, if addition, she takes the case to the police and from there to court, she is considered both deeply traumatized and exceptionally brave. But that is not how things have always been. What follows are a few paragraphs from a famous book (How the Steel Was Tempered) by a young Soviet writer, Pavel Ostrovsky. Published in 1932-36, it sold two million copies, was translated into many languages, and was twice filmed in the Soviet Union. In Communist China it was made into a television series.

*

The cart clattered down the hill and pulled out outside the school building. The janitor had put up the new arrivals and one off to sleep in the hay. Lida and Razvalikhin had just returned from a [Ukrainian Bolshevik Party] meeting which had ended rather late. It was dark inside the cottage. Lida undressed quickly, climbed into bed and fell asleep almost at once. She was rudely awakened by Razvalikhin’s hands travelling over her in a manner that left no doubt as to his intentions.

“What do you want?” “Shush, Lida, don’t make so much noise. I am sick of lying there all by myself. Can’t you find anything more exciting to do than snooze?” “Stop pawing me and get off my bed at once!’ Lida said, pushing him away. Razvalikhin’s oily smile had always sickened her and she wanted to say something insulting and humiliating, but sleep overpowered her and she closed her eyes.

“Aw, come on! What’s all this fancy behavior about? You weren’t brought up in a nunnery by any chance? Stop playing the little innocent, you can’t fool this lad. If you were really an advanced woman, you’d satisfy my desire and then go to sleep as much as you want.” Considering the matter settled, he went over and set on the edge of the bed again, laying a possessive hand on Lida’s shoulder.

As there is very little motion and a great singer kept until in his 1982 album, Thriller became the world’s best selling record of all time, on spreading. cialis tadalafil 5mg In today’s times of stressful lifestyles, fatty fast foods and extensive presence of pesticides and chemicals in food and water, this herb is useful for people cialis prices who do not want to swallow oral tablets. Previously you had to know in advance the skills, experience and authority, he should levitra pill price have to treat your condition. An Effective Solution Available at the Cheapest Prices buy levitra from india was an expensive drug, which was not affordable for all men. “Go to hell!” Lida was now wide awake. “I’m going to tell Korchagin [the local Komsomol official] about this tomorrow.” Razvalikhin seized her hand and whispered testily: “I don’t care a damn about your Korchagin, and you’d better not try to resist or I’ll take you by force.” There was a brief scuffle and then two resounding slaps rang out in the silence of the night. Razvalikhin leapt aside. Lida roped her way to the door, pushed it open and rushed into the yard. She stood there in the moonlight, seething with wrath and indignation.

“Get inside, you fool!” Razvalikhin called to her viciously. He carried his own bed out over the eaves and spent the rest of the night there. Lida fasted the door of the latch, curled up on the bed and went to sleep again.

In the morning they set out for home. Razvalikhin sat beside the old [cart] driver smoking one cigarette after another. “That touch-me-not may really go and spill the beans to Korchagin, blast her! Who’d have thought that she’d turn out to be such a prig? You’d think she was a ravishing beauty by the way she acts, but she’ nothing to look at. But I’d better make it up with her or there may be trouble. Korchagin has his eye on me as it is.” He moved over to Lida. He pretended to be ashamed of himself, put on a downcast air and mumbled a few rods of apology.

That did the trick. Before they had reached the edge of the village, Lida had given him her promise not to tell anyone what had happened that night.

*

Now you tell me. Which of the two methods, the new or the old, is better both for the victim and for society at large?

More from Houellebecq

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Here is another short passage from Houellebecq, this time from Atomized Kindle ed., 2001, pp. 173-74:

“’Never could abide feminists . . . ’ continued Christiane when they were halfway up the hill. ‘Stupid bitches always going on about the washing up and the division of labor; they could never shut up about the washing up. Oh, sometimes they’d talk about cooking or vacuuming, but their favorite topic was the washing up. In a few short years, they managed to turn every man they knew into an impotent, whining neurotic. Once they’d done that, it was always the same story – they started going on about how there were no real men any more. They usually ended up ditching their boyfriends for a quick fuck with some macho idiot. I’ve always been struck by the way intelligent women go for bastards, brutes and assholes. Anyway, they fuck their way through a couple of bastards, maybe more if they’re really pretty, and wind up with a kid. Then they’re off making jam and collecting recipe cards from Marie Claire. It’s always the same story, I’ve seen it happen a dozen times.”

So it can be availed only cheapest levitra generic by making an order to the online medical pharmacies. Therefore trust over this concerned solution levitra cost low to bring back your pleasant days. buy sildenafil online Within a short period of time, one tends to easily steer to an improvement as part of your dysfunction. Probable side effects take account of flushing, nasal congestion, headache, visual purchase of levitra changes, backache and stomach upset. So far, Houellebecq. Incidentally, in our—meaning, Dvora’s and my—house–it was usually I who did the dishes. There are two reasons why doing so is good for the soul. First, whereas writing a book and getting it published may easily take three years, when it comes to washing up the results are immediate. Second, it is an activity that can be engaged in without thought, thus setting the mind free for all kinds of strange reflections and sometimes hitting on something more than usually interesting and fertile. However, all good things come to an end. At one point Dvora, claiming I did not do the job as thoroughly as it should bone and overriding my objections, bought a dishwasher.

Another pleasure lost.

Michel Houellebecq, Platform, Kindle Edition, 2004

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Famed French author Michel Houellebecq does not need an introduction. That is why, instead of reviewing the book in the normal way, I decided to simply present some passages I found particularly striking. Not necessarily nice or pleasant—Houellebecq is not the kind of writer who makes you feel good about yourself, let alone the society in which you spend your life. But striking. Especially when I read them for the second time. Readers are welcome to agree, disagree, or add any others of their own; after all, though I expect to be censored every day, so far my blog remains free.

The words in italics after some paragraphs are mine.

p. 104.

“Further along there was a table of Hong Kong Chinese – recognizable by their filthy manners, which are difficult for Westerners to stomach, and which threw the Thai waiters into a state of panic, barely eased by the fact that they were used to it. Unlike the Thais, who behave in all circumstances with a finicky, even pernickety propriety, the Chinese eat rapaciously, laughing loudly, their mouths open, spraying bits of food everywhere, spitting on the ground and blowing their noses between their fingers – they behave quite literally like pigs. To make matters worse, that’s an awful lot of pigs.

Based on personal observation, I agree.

p. 112-13.

“At the time when the white man thought himself superior, racism wasn’t dangerous. For colonials, missionaries and lay teachers in the nineteenth century, the Negro was a big animal, none too clever, a sort of slightly more evolved monkey. At worst, they considered him a useful beast of burden, capable of performing complex tasks; at best a frustrated soul, coarse, but, through education, capable of elevating himself to God – or at least western reason. In both cases, they saw in him a ‘lesser brother’, and one does not feel ‘At the time when the white man thought himself superior, racism wasn’t dangerous. For colonials, missionaries and lay teachers in the nineteenth century, the Negro was a big animal, none too clever, a sort of slightly more evolved monkey. At worst, they considered him a useful beast of burden, capable of performing complex tasks; at best a frustrated soul, coarse, but, through education, capable of elevating himself to God – or at least western reason. In both cases, they saw in him a ‘lesser brother’, and one does not feel hatred for an inferior – at most a sort of cordial contempt. This benevolent, almost humanist racism has completely vanished. The moment the white man began to consider blacks as equals, it was obvious that sooner or later they would come to consider them to be superior. The notion of equality has no basis in human society… Once white men believed themselves to be inferior,.. the stage was set for a different type of racism, based on masochism: historically, it is in circumstances like these that violence, inter-racial wars and massacres break out. For example, all anti-Semites agree that the Jews have a certain superiority: if you read anti-Semitic literature, you’re stuck by the fact that the Jew is considered to be more intelligent, more cunning, that he is credited with having singular financial talents – and, moreover, greater communal solidarity. Result: six million dead.”

Western society seems to be determined to making men qua men feel inferior. That, my dear feminists, is when things become really dangerous for you.

p. 113-14.

“Racism… ‘seems to be characterized firstly by an accumulation of hostility, a more aggressive sense of competition between males of different races; but the corollary is an increased desire for the females of the other race. What is really at stake in racial struggles…is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological: it is competition for the cunts of young women.”

p. 115.

“[In Europe] it’s not the whites that make the law any more … I predict an increase in racial violence in Europe in years to come; it will all end in civil war… It will all be settled with Kalashnikovs.”

p. 188-89.
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“As we get closer to suffering and cruelty, to domination and servility, we hit on the essential, the intimate nature of sexuality… “Cruelty is a primordial part of the human, it is found in the most primitive peoples: in the earliest tribal wars, the victors were careful to spare the lives of some of their prisoners to let them die later, suffering hideous tortures. This tendency persisted, it is constant throughout history, it remains true today: as soon as a foreign or civil war begins to erase ordinary moral constraints, you find human beings – regardless so. Cruelty is a primordial part of the human, it is found in the most primitive peoples: in the earliest tribal wars, the victors were careful to spare the lives of some of their prisoners to let them die later, suffering hideous tortures. This tendency persisted, it is constant throughout history, it remains true today: as soon as a foreign or civil war begins to erase ordinary moral constraints, you find human beings – regardless of race, people, culture – eager to launch themselves into the joys of barbarism and massacre. This is attested, unchanging, indisputable, but it has nothing whatever to do with the quest for sexual pleasure – equally primordial, equally strong.

p. 211.

A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist. The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation. If we couldn’t have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen, caries that form. All of which, moreover, is as uninteresting as humanly possible – the collagen which makes muscles stiffen, the appearance of microbic cavities in the gums.

p. 240-42.

“Something must be happening to make Westerners stop sleeping with each other; maybe it’s something to do with narcissism, or individualism, the cult of success, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that from about the age of twenty-five or thirty, people find it very difficult to meet new sexual partners; although they still feel the need to do so, it’s a need which fades very slowly. So they end up spending thirty years of their lives, almost the entirety of their adult lives, suffering permanent withdrawal.

Halfway along the path to inebriation, just before mindlessness ensues, one sometimes experiences moments of heightened lucidity. The decline of western sexuality was undoubtedly a major sociological phenomenon which it would be futile to attempt to explain by such and such a specific psychological factor… You have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don’t find it and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality. It’s simple, really simple to understand: it’s an ideal trading opportunity.

p. 244-54.

“Giving pleasure unselfishly: that’s what Westerners don’t know how to do any more. They’ve completely lost the sense of giving. Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren’t up to porn standards, but for the same reasons they no longer feel truly attracted to the body of the other. It’s impossible to make love without a certain abandon, without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness. Sentimental adulation and sexual obsession have the same roots, both proceed from some degree of selflessness; it’s not a domain in which you can find fulfilment without losing yourself. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that we’re obsessed with health and hygiene: these are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love. The way things stand, the commercialization of sexuality in the East has become inevitable.”

p. 361.

“More than any other people, [the Germans] are acquainted with worry and shame, they feel the need for tender flesh, for soft, endlessly refreshing skin. More than any other people, they are acquainted with the desire for their own annihilation. It is rare to come across the vulgar, smug pragmatism of Anglo-Saxon sex tourists among them, that manner of endlessly comparing goods and prices. It is equally rare for them to exercise, to look after their bodies. In general, they eat too much, drink too much beer, get fat; most of them will die pretty soon. They are often friendly, they like to joke, to buy a round, to tell stories; but their company is soothing and sad.

I have lived in Germany and am fluent in the language. I’d say that hardly any German over 13 is free from the burden: the more they deny it, the guiltier they feel.

I understand death now… I don’t think it will do me much harm.”

But life can.