Category: Commentary

On Leadership

I generally avoid jumping headlong into the daily political sewage of a Presidential campaign, but sometimes the subject matter gets too close to home, and the level of feces gets so high, I just can’t resist.

This is one of those times.

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in the 2024 campaign for President. Among the personal achievements attesting to his leadership is a career in the US Army National Guard, reaching the rank of Command Sergeant Major (CSM), the highest enlisted rank in the service, a feat which is indeed rare. You don’t achieve that rank without impressing many people for many different reasons, and it is indeed something to celebrate and honor.

Predictably, Governor Walz’ record has come under attack. These charges against him surfaced during his first campaign for the US House of Representatives, and again when he ran and won for Governor. However, the scrutiny of a national campaign is unlike any other. What are the charges?

First, he made an off-hand claim, during a 2018 meeting to consider new gun control restrictions in his state, that “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war (emphasis added), are only carried in war.” Gov. Walz never served in war, or even in a war zone. He did deploy to Europe during Operation Enduring Freedom, but saw nothing even vaguely resembling combat. The charge against him is “stolen valor,” that is claiming the honor due only combat veterans. He has made this claim only once, and it was about the weapons, not his service. I am inclined to pass this off as an inartful phrase. If more such video clips emerge (remember, scrutiny), it would be a major problem.

Second, he has referred to himself as a retired CSM, which is incorrect. Upon retirement, his rank reverted to Master Sergeant, as he had not completed the full requirements for the higher rank. As a person who left reserve duty as a Major, I can assure you my permanent rank is Captain, as I did not meet the requirements to retain the title of field grade officer. It’s a technicality, but not one to be taken lightly: it will say “CPT, USA” on my niche in Arlington National Cemetery. Walz has at times referred to himself as a former CSM, which is correct. Again, I believe we should give him the benefit of the doubt on this, as it is a technical issue about which only those very familiar with ranks and privileges would know or care.

Finally, Walz was CSM for a US Army National Guard artillery battalion when he retired. The unit was subsequently deployed into combat in Iraq, leading to the charge he abandoned his unit on the verge of deployment. There are things one needs to understand about this situation. First off, the battalion CSM is considered one of the “top three” in the unit: the commander (a Lieutenant Colonel), the executive officer (usually a Major), and the CSM, the senior enlisted person. This is the leadership team and the US Army makes it point to ensure the leadership team is intact before deploying a unit to combat: it undermines unit morale when the troops see a senior leader leaving when they are going into a fight. It can’t always be avoided, but it is a rare event.

A US Army Reserve or National Guard deployment is negotiated long in advance of formal orders. It begins with the Department of the Army contacting the unit and engaging in a ‘frank and earnest’ discussion about deployment. Yes, your unit readiness report is great, but how is morale? Your leadership team is excellent, but are they all ready to go? CSM, what about the troops: are there many pregnancies among the spouses, or children with special needs or any other considerations weighing on the deployment? How will it affect the community, as these are citizen-soldiers? Only when the Army leadership has completed a face-to-face discussion with the unit leadership is a deployment order agreed to and issued.

Much is made of the date of then CSM Walz’s retirement, and the fact it predates the deployment order. Now you know why that is irrelevant. If you don’t believe me, look into the statements from CSM Walz’s colleagues at the time, who explain that he confided in them he was considering retiring to run for Congress in lieu of deploying. So he knew about the probable deployment, knew what it meant to his unit, and chose to leave. He is also quoted by these colleagues as indicating he could do more for the common good in Congress than in the battalion. There is a ring of truth to that statement, if also a whiff of ambition.

There are four hundred and thirty five members of the US House of Representatives, and I can guarantee you every new one is last in line for influence. It is not that they are unimportant, just that their prospects to make a difference are in the future. There is only one Command Sergeant Major in a battalion, responsible for being the senior enlisted advisor to the Commander. They are critical to the success or failure of the mission, as the Army is more dependent on its non-commissioned officer corps than any other service. Being the Battalion CSM of a deployed unit in combat is the pinnacle of an enlisted redleg’s (artilleryman’s) career.

Then SSG Walz (right) circa 1992

Those charging Gov. Walz with cowardice or desertion go too far; there is no evidence to support that. And yes, the Army deployed his unit and it performed its mission with a replacement as CSM; that is what the Army does. Yet the fact remains that he cites his military service proudly, while at the critical moment, he did not answer the call. He probably chose wisely: his post-military political career has been quite successful.

Sometimes military leaders have to make terrible choices, like which part of the unit to sacrifice to save the rest. Sometimes they have to make sacrifices themselves. Then-CSM Walz did not “abandon” his unit. At the critical moment, heading into combat for which he had spent a career preparing, he consciously chose to pursue a more promising future. Whatever choice leaders make tells you much about them as leaders, much more than what rank they wore, or what office they achieved.

What Just Happened? Immunity from Hysteria

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court walks into a bar. The bartender asks “what are you drinking?”

The Justice says, “I’ll have an Old Fashioned. Anything new happening today?”

The bartender shrugs, “not unless you count that the American justice system is dying.”

“Is that so?” the Justice replies. “Make it a double then!”

Have you read the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Trump vs the United States? At one hundred and nineteen pages, few have. But that didn’t stop the hype machine from making instant analysis, just to get you riled. Fear not, I have now read it, along with a bunch (technical term) of legal analysis–both for and against. And now I’ll give you what you need to consider to form an enlightened opinion.

Put away your tinfoil, they’re not coming for you

First off, let’s demolish some partisan talking points, so they don’t cloud our thinking. Prior to the announcement, which came on the last possible day for release, some talking heads speculated that the Supreme Court had already given former President Trump what he wanted, since the delay involved in their deliberations pushed the trial charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith almost certainly past the election in November. According to this line of (dare I call it) thinking, the Supreme Court was in the tank for Trump, regardless of what they decided, since Trump could not be found guilty before voters chose for President. Except for the fact that he is already once-convicted, many times indicted, and is there anybody who doesn’t have a formed opinion about Donald J. Trump? Some may not know whether they will or won’t vote for him, but no conviction was going to stop him from being the GOP nominee. And by the way, there was a very good reason for the long delay: this was a seminal case in American jurisprudence!

From the breathless discussion about Seal Team Six (more on that later), you might think the President was once not above the law, but suddenly that changed on July first. Except it didn’t. Since the Clinton presidency, all Attorneys General and all Departments of Justice have held that a sitting President cannot be charged or indicted for official acts during his term in office. So the President, while in office, has always been somewhat “above the law.” That was so for Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. Any one of them could dial up the Seal Team, and face no criminal charge.

But that was only a departmental policy, not a decision from any court. Many courts had mentioned it, but the Supreme Court had never decisively ruled on it. The only case involving Presidential immunity was Nixon vs Fitzgerald, which held that in civil cases, the President “is entitled to absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts.” So this Trump case was incredibly important, as there was little precedent, except as noted. That precedent laid out important reasons a President could not be sued for damages, as it would prevent the President from completing his duties. So the concept of the President, as President, not being the same under the law was well understood. And the understanding included the concept that political or policy disagreements were best dealt with in the political process, up to and including impeachment.

What did the Supreme Court hold in Trump vs. the United States? It created a three part test for immunity.

  • For official acts that are part of the President’s core functions, he has absolute immunity. So in appointing ambassadors or judges, ordering the military, hiring or firing federal officials and the like, the only appropriate redress is via elections or impeachment. No prosecutor can charge him, try him, or convict him.
  • For all other official acts, he has presumptive immunity. These are acts where as President he shares authority, say, with the Congress, for example in executing appropriations. Presumptive immunity means a prosecutor could charge/try/convict him, but first the prosecutor must convince the judge that such an action will not infringe on the President’s ability to do his job. Which is a very high bar.
  • For all unofficial acts, the President has no immunity. If President Trump decides to rob a 7/11, he can be perp-walked into trial.

While some are acting like American justice just died, I would note that some honesty peaked through the blustery hyperbole. In the New York Times, Maggie Haberman wrote, “The broad contours of the ruling — that presidents would be entitled to substantial protection for official acts — had been expected by political and court watchers for months.” If you only follow the news through the lens of Donald Trump, you might not know this, but informed opinion had pretty much figured this ruling out in advance. While the case was named for the former President, and directly affects his possible trials, the Supreme Court had a duty to provide a ruling protecting the Presidency, the nation, and the Constitution. Neither to protect Donald Trump, nor “get him.”

What the decision did was create a very clear test for the lower court to administer. Some of Jack Smith’s charges against former President Trump are now excluded as core functions. Some will have presumptive immunity. Some may be unofficial, and can proceed to trial. That won’t happen fast enough for anti-Trump partisans, but adherence to the Constitution is more important than getting Trump. The other, very important effect of this ruling is what it preempted. I can guarantee you that if the ruling had been of the “no-immunity” variety, many charges were pending. Charges against Presidents Clinton & Obama for drone strikes, including ones which killed American citizens. Charges against Biden as an accessory to murder for the illegal immigrant attacks in Texas and Georgia. I’m sure the left would have found more things with which to charge Bush and Trump.

It doesn’t matter whether you think any of these charges would have stuck. The precedent would be, charge the President you don’t like. And it would have been debilitating to the presidency, as Chief Justice Roberts noted in the majority opinion. That was the world we avoided, and it was not hypothetical. It was only waiting to be born.

Finally, what of the oft-quoted “Seal Team Six” hypothetical? If anybody mentions this to you, you will immediately know they are either mouthing a meaningless partisan talking point, or seriously confused. “Wait just a minute, Pat, didn’t Justice Sotomayor raise this very issue in her dissent?” Yes, yes she did. Her dissents are legend among serious jurists. That’s not me talking: she onetime got so lost in the emotions of her argument, she incurred a written rebuke (in Daimler vs Bauman) from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg! One can only imagine how bad things must be for RBG to have publicly criticized a fellow justice.

To make the point, arguing that this ruling fails to protect us from Seal Team Six is like arguing that the Covid vaccine doesn’t prevent cancer. Right. It doesn’t, nor was it intended to. President Biden can indeed order the Seal team to assassinate former President Trump right now. What does protect us from such an action? Not a Supreme Court decision on Presidential immunity, but the republican (note the small “r”) values of our government which demand fealty to a Constitution, not a person. An illegal order will not be followed by the chain of command, not only because they have no immunity (which in my example, President Biden would have!), but because they know it is wrong. If you think that is too slim a reed for protection, riddle me this: during the fifty-some odd years of the Cold War, nothing kept the President from ordering a random, reasonless nuclear strike. Yet I will bet–if you’re old enough–you never lost a moment of sleep about it. For the same reason.

Justice Sotomayor does make a strong argument that since all Presidents up to this point thought they were criminally liable after office, what could be the possible threat impeding them from executing their duties? But she gives the game away by failing to note the change: when has any former President faced four indictments and eighty-eight felony counts, suddenly applied in the months preceding an re-election campaign? And she signs off not with the customary “respectfully dissent” but “with fear for our democracy (sic).” With that, she models Lieutenant Commander Galloway in “A Few Good Men.”

"Oh, well, if you strenuously object, then I should take time to reconsider. "
She should have said “strenuously

So stop with the Seal Team Six (and other equally ridiculous hypotheticals) already. Understand that a world where a sitting or former President could be charged, tried, and convicted for official actions was not a hypothetical, but a nightmare waiting to happen. Consider what is going on in the news, the courts and public opinion not in terms of Trump, but in terms of how things will be when Trump is only in the history books.

The decision in Trump vs. the United States serves to enable a presidency without enabling any specific abuses. It prevents the kind of litigation which would only serve to tie the executive branch in knots. Whether it helps Trump in the short term is not the most significant factor. But hey, revel in another round of hypotheticals if you prefer.

Postscript: The immunity ruling highlights another problem with the need to “get Trump” before this year’s election. The New York state felony trial, a state jurisdiction and dealing with strictly non-presidential conduct, was the one trial most secured from Trump’s ability to pardon, immunize, or halt if he were to regain office. Judge Merchan pushed the trial forward relentlessly, despite objections by Trump’s defense team and counsel from outside observers that there were many reasons to take one’s time. This became the first trial to convict a former President on a felony charge. Now, because the judge admitted to court evidence from White House personnel, he has delayed sentencing at least until September, as he considers whether his admission of such evidence was prohibited by the ruling in Trump vs the United States. Whatever you thought of the case (I wasn’t a fan, although it was obvious Trump was guilty as charged), once again haste has complicated the outcome.

Faith, Reason, & Ignorance

Science is a body of knowledge stemming from a process of experimentation. Scientific theories explain the phenomena being investigated. When something new is discovered, a new theory must replace the old one; hence science is never “settled” but always dynamic.

No scientific theory seems more well-attested than gravity. Everyone knows what gravity is: the attraction between any two objects of mass. Everyone knows that gravity is real; a common joke for people who describe some scientific finding as “just a theory” is to suggest they test the “theory” of gravity by jumping out a window. We can even calculate gravity’s effects with great accuracy and precision. For the longest time, scientists could do all these things without being able to show “how” one body attracted another. Many scientists searched (still do) for “gravitons,” invisible particles which moved between the masses to connect them. But they remain elusive.

Only in 1915 did Albert Einstein explain that mass distorts or bends “space-time,” causing smaller objects to move toward larger ones (i.e., gravity). Got that? Probably not. Most folks could spend a lifetime studying space-time and not quite get it. Mostly because it cannot be seen. We can measure how it works, see its effects in things like gravity, but the thing itself, space-time? Well, it remains elusive. But it does explain gravity, so we accept it.

Image depicting mass (the Earth) distorting space-time

What does that mean, that we accept it? It works, at least as far as we can tell. We believe it. We have faith in the scientists, the scientific method, and the theory.

Oh, there’s that word. “But, Pat,” you object, “we can prove it exists and works, so that’s not faith, it’s science!” Perhaps. But does gravity work the same way at the quantum level (very small) as it does on the cosmic level (very large)? Science still can’t tell if it does. But we trust in the scientists, the experimental results, because they represent what we can experience in real life: gravity. That trust, despite not being able to see gravitons or know exactly how space-time works? That’s faith, baby.

In a similar manner, consider mathematics, a pure art where truth is not abstract. Numbers are concrete things, and mathematical equations have a right and wrong answer. At the most basic level of math, there are equations and proofs which defy uncertainty. But the deeper you go in math, the fuzzier it gets. Get into algebra and physics, and you run into things called irrational numbers: numbers that can only be approximated, because the full understanding of the number is a non-repeating decimal sequence: √2 or π are irrational numbers. They are very real, but never exact.

Deeper still lie complex or imaginary numbers. What!?!? What is the square root of a negative number? Any negative times itself is positive, so the question in unsolvable without the creation of another axis (think of real plus and minus numbers being along a line) of numbers which have the identifier “i” added. Now the square root of negative four is two i (√-4 = 2i). Try to find these numbers in real life, and they remain (again) elusive . . . but important. Much of what we understand about electricity stems from working with imaginary numbers, and the same concepts are critical in calculus, necessary in so many other technological endeavors. The very name imaginary numbers points out the fact these can’t be seen, can’t be found, only theorized: believed in. Because they work.

“To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see.”

Hebrews 11:1

I frequently see friends on social media making derogatory statements about faith, of the sort, “I believe in reason, not faith,” “faith is blindly accepting some dogma or belief,” or “faith is unREASONABLE.” If faith were any of those things, I would agree with them. The truth is, faith is none of them, and the so-called reasonable people rely on faith, too. Religious faith is simply trust in God, a simple statement carried even on American currency (i.e., “In God We Trust”). Faith is not something we do, it is a gift, free to be accepted or rejected. The faithful receive the gift and trust the Giver, believing what God has said about how to live and what awaits those who do so faithfully. Those who reject the gift do not see (cannot see) what the faithful see.

Try avoiding these, if you want to stay away from faith

Perhaps you have heard the phrase “for those with faith, no explanation is necessary; for those without faith, no explanation is possible” often applied to miraculous events. The faithful can simply accept what they see; the faithless can only question, but not explain. As is often the case, Saint Augustine of Hippo put it succinctly: crede ut intellegas, or “believe so that you may understand.” The faithful believe because it works: life becomes intelligible, even joyful, when one suddenly sees the world through the eyes of faith. Not carefree nor easy, mind you. But joy-filled. It just works.

What do we call people who refuse to believe something, even if it works? Some might be ignorant, simply unable to understand. Others might be delusional, unable to discern what’s real or what’s not. All of these folks deserve our empathy, as they face challenges no one would want to face. But what about people who know better, but still refuse to accept? That’s what I call un-reasonable!

Book Report: A History of the American People

This is a 1997 work by British journalist and amateur historian Paul Johnson, who died last year. You may ask yourself, “Why read a history book that is a quarter century out of date?” I’m glad you asked. Partially, it came to my library as a gift (thanks, Catherine & John), partially because it is well written, but mostly because it is out of date. Think about it: history is the process of sorting the current and transitory from the long-lasting and important. What is good today may look less so with the lens of time: bell-bottom jeans, anyone? A history book written before 9/11, Bush v. Gore, Covid, and the Trump phenomenon is unspoiled by the need to address those issues. And the truth it seeks to find can be tested against what we as readers now know, which the author could not know many years ago.

Weighing in at more than one thousand pages, this is not your beach-reading selection. I took it with me on a long cruise (more on that soon), and I easily won the “who has the most ridiculously large-sized book to read” pool-side contest. I needed an extra towel to use as a chest lectern to read the tome. Despite its heft, Johnson’s work is well-written and easy to read. He was a self-proclaimed English leftist who gradually evolved into a conservative, and he admits to having a traditional English public (meaning private/elite) school education, which was long on English history but barely mentioned the colonies with the exception of some troubles in the late eighteenth century.

He writes with the detachment of a foreign observer, but the insight of a close family member. That he was an admirer of the American experiment is clear throughout the work, but he feels free to point out the warts and all of our history. The book highlights the tensions in the American experiment: the emphasis on individual liberty and the acceptance of slavery, the democratic language hung like garland on a republican system of government, the city-on-a-hill idealism and the realpolitik of Native American policies. All through it, he highlights an important American creed: the right of the person to “get along” (his wording) by succeeding at whatever he wants to do without help or hindrance from the government. The bounty of the American expanse, especially in land, means to this day there is room for the productive person to leave behind whatever society, religion, or caste holds him back, and come to America and succeed.

Among Johnson’s most penetrating insights were:

  • the unique nature of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they created. Lost in today’s criticism of them is the fact they created not only the best, but the first written constitution, and one which has lasted the longest and been most successfully adapted.
  • The importance of compromise in American success, both in political and personal activities. When Americans have been willing to accept half a loaf (metaphorically speaking), they have been most successful. When they insist on purity of thought and policy, they have failed. The original concept of the separation of Church and State lies in the former, while Prohibition is in the latter.
  • The long history of partisan media, which only briefly in the twentieth century veered toward something self-described as “objective journalism” but then morphed into a elite, independent interest group. Today’s partisan media sources are actually a return to what the Founders saw as normal, even if they didn’t like it then, either.
  • A similar history of political violence that dwarfs anything happening today. A good dose of history provides solid immunity to those shouting about the “unprecedented” this or that event. We’re not tarring-n-feathering one another, beating Representatives near to death in the Capitol, or loosing the FBI and IRS on political opponents. Wait, hold up on that last one.
  • While Johnson’s conservative views are evident, his consistent appraisal of Presidents defies partisan approaches. Coolidge and LBJ do well, Bush ’41 and Clinton do not. He prefers Reagan to Carter, but Nixon to either. His overall positive appraisal of Nixon brings howls from liberals and progressives, but his factual account of Nixon’s record is unassailable, and while no one apparently voted for him in 1972, he won the greatest electoral/popular victory in American history, a sin for which the newly self-appointed media opposition will never forgive him. The author criticizes both FDR and JFK for widespread mendacity and libertine behavior, but gives the former his due in enacting the New Deal.

Worth reading? absolutely. There’s a free copy floating about in the library aboard the Celebrity Silhouette. Versions are no doubt in your local library or available cheap on line. One final amusing anecdote: When I considered the work’s reviews on Amazon, I noted the vast majority were positive. Some got quite excited that Johnson confused some civil war generals or the dates of specific events. But the interesting ones went like this: ‘I enjoyed this book until it got into current events, when it became clear the author had clearly lost his mind (i.e., disagreed with my views).’ All I could think of was: is it more likely a well-published author suddenly lost his way at the end of a history work, or is it more likely your views don’t have the historic pedigree you thought, and perhaps need to be rethought? Good books are like that, they cause you to think, not just react.

AI

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

To borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky, “you may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence is interested in you.” It’s hard to avoid the subject of artificial intelligence, or AI, today. It’s all over the news, with bold predictions of how it will change everything. AI stocks are super hot, and China and the United States are in a chip race based on AI requirements. States, cities, and companies are building vast server farms to feed AI, spiking energy demand at exactly the same moment we’re supposed to be transitioning to electric vehicles! Much of what you hear is hype (no surprise), and you may be old enough (like me) to think, “well that will be somebody else’s problem with which to deal.” But probably not. However AI plays out, it will affect you within a few years, so it may be worth it to understand a little about AI now. Here goes:

I. AI is artificial, but it is not intelligence.

Some of the results AI programs can produce may look almost magical, but in the end, they result from a simple process. Everything called AI today is based on computer coding of large language models (LLMs). What is that? You already know that computers use “ones” and “zeros” (or digits, hence the digital world) to do everything they do. These large language models take words and turn them into tokens, or groups of ones/zeros. The base language doesn’t matter, which is why LLMs can work wonders with translations. What the program does is take the tokens (words in your view) and predict what the next token should be. The prediction uses a probability model (ok, no more math) that says, “based on what I have been trained on, what should the next word be?”

As a simple example, if you trained a LLM on the works of Shakespeare, then you asked it to describe “love,” the LLM would say things like, “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” or “when love speaks, the voice of all the gods make heaven drowsy with the harmony.” Beautiful, no? Now if you added the lyrics from the J. Geils band to the model’s learning, it might say “love stinks.” Which answer it gives is based on how many times it sees that particular combination of words, and who says it, and how.

But wait a second, we’re falling into a trap by using phrases like “it says” or “it sees.” It does nothing of the sort. The model searches its repository of data and pulls out all the tokens which represent “love” then looks at the tokens surrounding that token, then puts them together to respond to you. There is no thought involved. But how does it get such amazing textual answers?

The key is feeding the model more and more data. Companies started using things like Wikipedia, but that isn’t enough. Now they’re scraping public social media, ingesting copyrighted material, anything to get more data. Because the more data that your AI model uses to train on, the better the results you get. One problem AI faces is recency bias. In the rush to add ever more sources, developers turn to today’s data. Almost no one is creating original data from the 19th century, while the Kardashians probably provide a megabyte a minute. AI will lean ever more heavily on recent data for learning, which negates one of the lessons of history: the things that are best are those which stand the test of time. AI does not care about “right” and “wrong,” just “fit.”

II. AI is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

The use of tools is the story of humanity, from fire to the wheel to flight to computers. Tools are neither good nor evil; it is all about how you use them. A steak knife can cut a filet or a jugular vein. Alfred Nobel thought TNT would revolutionize mining and engineering. So there is no reason to fear AI, but there are many reasons to learn about it.

Like any tool, AI requires some initial effort on your part to work properly. If you don’t learn to use it through practice, you’ll find it too hard to use (the story of me and typing, as my two-finger approach can attest!). Also, AI benefits from you, as another source of learning. AI programs learn how you speak, how you think, what you expect from interactions with you, and then can respond better to you. Of course, that also opens the door to manipulation, too. Current AI developers are not consciously trying to program AI to be “addictive,” but that is a real possibility.

As a tool, AI most benefits those who can master it. Regular AI users point out that if you ask AI a stupid or poorly-worded question, it may give you a similar answer! Why? Not even the developers know for sure. There is no way to “open the hood” and look at what the model is doing; it is just “doing.” Another mind-blowing fact: AI developers have noticed the AI programs seem to work more slowly and are less productive during December. The developers think the AI has “internalized” the notion of a holiday season from its data, and answers accordingly.

III. AI can do many things for you, but maybe not better than you.

Since it is ultimately simply a computer program, AI is fantastic at taking over mundane or routine work. It never tires, never sleeps, never asks for a raise. Computer programmers love it, as “coding” often involves reams of simple instructions which are boring to write, but perfect to be automated. AI is great at giving you choices. Remember how great it was when you first googled “synonyms for” and found a ton of great alternatives? Now you can ask AI to take a paragraph you wrote and give you five different and better alternatives, and milliseconds later, you have them. AI assistants can “look over your shoulder” as you work on an email, for example, and tell you that your tone is harsh or you’ve mixed up the dates you’ve asked for the work to be completed.

What do you do better than AI? Probably the things at which you are best. The initial AI efforts wrote about as well as a sixth-grader. Current models are working at the undergraduate-level. AI will continue to advance, but it will never replace human expertise. For one thing, its data is based on human expertise, so it needs humans to continue pushing the limits of science, art, philosophy and the like in order to provide the “tokens” AI uses. So a very good lawyer may use AI to do research, or to hone a closing argument, but she will not be replaced by AI. Because AI also “hallucinates.” (Notice how we anthropomorphize AI? we have to talk about it a living, thinking “thing” just to make sense of it!).

There are great examples of this. Remember how AI “guesses” the next word? In most legal briefs, you’ll find the phrase “according to the case of X vs Y, . . .” AI “knows” it should use these tokens when you ask it a legal question, but if it can’t find the right citation, it will simply invent one! To AI, these are the right “tokens” to use, but to us, it’s just plain making things up. Since it has no free will, the AI developers call it hallucinating, since what AI does makes sense to it, but not in the real world.

AI can also be manipulated. Perhaps you heard about Google’s AI called Gemini, which started generating images of black Nazis, Asian Vikings, and Indian Romans. How did that happen. AI generated tokens to create images, but a developer put a filter in the program to make the images it created “more diverse.” So AI promptly ignored reality and made black Nazis. These problems are easy to correct, but demonstrate how AI can go wrong.

Now that’s diversity in action! (from the New York Times)

Positive counter examples exist in the world of medicine. AI can look at hundreds of millions of CAT scans and never tires, never has a headache or eye-strain. A good technician will still beat AI, but AI can serve as an initial screening tool or a post facto double-check. AI can also look at large bodies of medical data and find correlations which individual doctors might never see. Likewise, AI is looking at the development of thousands of ways to fold protein molecules into amino acids and thereby make treatments for various illnesses and conditions. Such work, even with modern supercomputers, would have taken decades.

IV. AI is coming, like it or not.

AI is part of the ongoing digital revolution, which means it happens at a pace with which we humans just aren’t prepared to deal. We have gone from the beta (testing) version of AI to level 4.0 in about ten years, and the trend is accelerating. Unlike the flying cars we were all promised in the 1960s, or the electric vehicle revolution which is always just around the corner, AI is already creeping into many things, whether you realize it or not.

Computers were supposed to replace mundane tasks, and they did put typists out of a job, but then coders became a thing. Now coders are in danger, and even so-called “white collar” workers are being reviewed. If you’re average or below average at your white-collar job (and half of people are, by definition), your boss will be considering whether an AI program could easily replace you. AI is seeping into service centers, the places where someone from India tried to convince you they were in Cincinnati and really wanted to help you. AI can make travel recommendations, edit papers, even “teach.” As it does so, there will be examples of really excellent AI efforts that are astoundingly successful, and others which are complete busts.

What cannot be denied is that the level of investment going on in the AI field, the development of the data sources and the research into better ways for AI to learn mean it will continue to affect you, personally, whether you realize it or not.

V. AI will exacerbate inequality.

As much as humans are a learning species, it is amazing that we always convince ourselves this next tool will be all to the good. Mark Zuckerberg thought Facebook would be a place for people to connect and become “friends.” This despite his original intent was to create a site for guys to rate girls on their “attractiveness.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google worked under the motto, “Don’t be evil,” despite the fact illegal child porn was immediately one of the top search functions.

The internet writ large didn’t make humans smarter, despite making all the world’s knowledge instantly searchable. It did allow neo-Nazis, perverts, and fraudsters a chance to meet and grow. All that information devolves into cat videos, Tindr, and scams. AI will be no different. A good writer will perfect an even better paragraph or story. A scam artist, a better pitch, customized just to you. A good priest, a better sermon. A crank, a more inviting screed against whatever. For every medical breakthrough, there will be fake-news causing unnecessary death or illness.

The power of AI will enable people to do great and terrible things. Those who better understand AI will be better at using it, and far better at avoiding it using them.

Spring Forward !?!?!

America just went through its annual rite of passage, jumping forward to daylight saving time. It is always accompanied by another round of complaints, confusion, and protest. Americans have so little to argue about, it’s a good thing they still have this (sarcastic font). In the end, it’s all a battle about sunlight, when you get it, and what you call it.

Let’s start with the basics. The amount of daylight one receives daily depends primarily on one’s latitude (a north-south measure). At the equator, it’s twelve hours daily, always. As you move north or south, days become increasingly longer (in summer) or shorter (in winter). The seasonal daylight change is actually due to the Earth’s inclination (tilt), but let’s not introduce astronomy, ok? So there’s little reason to fool with the clocks for lands near the equator, as the amount of sunlight at say 7:00 am is roughly the same, January through December. But as you move toward the poles and light becomes dearer in the dreary winter, your children will be waiting for the school bus in the dark, or you will be driving home from work at night. Likewise, plentiful Summer daylight could be wasted in bed, so the idea was born to simply change what we call the time to adjust that variable to when the sunlight is available.

Next subject is geography. Most countries lie in a single time zone. It is an odd coincidence that most countries are either roughly square or taller (north-south) than wider. While they may switch from standard to daylight saving times (and back) during the year, the whole country is affected uniformly. If your nation fits snugly into a time zone, the fact it gets dark at 5:00 pm in one city and 5:15 in another and 5:30 in a third is hardly worth arguing about.

The major exceptions to this rule are the United States, Canada, Russia, China, and Australia, which span multiple times zones. Russia spans the most (nine), followed by Canada (five and a half!), China (should be four, but is one), the continental USA (four) and Australia (three). Which of these things is not like the other? Only in the US is the population spread out both across and within the time zones. Russia and Australia have the bulk of their people in a single time zone and vast relatively unpopulated other time zones. China is likewise, but simply mandates everyone be on “Beijing time.” Screw you, Xinjiang if dawn is at 11:00 am! Canada has population spread, but is still relatively sparse. In three of the four continental US time zones, there are several large cities on different (east-west) sides of a single time zone. Which means there are many people who will be advantaged or disadvantaged by being in the same time zone. When you try to make the bus stop happen in daylight in Boston, the commute home in Detroit is pitch dark, or vice versa). That is the simple reason it’s always been a contentious issue in the US, especially more so than in other countries.

Let’s take Mexico for example. The federal government did away with daylight saving (note there is no extra “s”) time last year. Mexico has four time zones, with the bulk of the population being in the Mexico City time zone. Quintana Roo (home of Cancún and the other resorts) mirrors US Eastern time, as that is where the bulk of its tourist business lives. Likewise, the Mexican border states mirror their northern cousins, switching or not to simplify travel and trade across the border. Mexico is in the tropics, so the real daylight change is between one and two hours at most, so no one is terribly disadvantaged and time doesn’t become a contentious issue.

Why do we even change times? It started as a wartime experiment when the US adopted it in 1918 during WWI. The idea was to economize on power and fuel by adjusting times so war industry workers had access to the most daylight in Summer. No one has ever definitively proved any real advantage to it, however. The initial opposition was attributed to farmers who complained about messing with Mother Nature, but this is probably apocryphal, since farmers work on natural schedules, and don’t care whether city folk call dawn 5:00 am or 6:00 am; it’s just when the animals need feeding.

Another silly argument to dispense with is based on the recurrent studies which show negative health effects from time changes. These are what is known as correlation–not causation–effects, meaning two things vary together but one does not cause another. If you ever heard the phrase “what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” the meaning of that obscure saying is that you can find many variables that increase or decrease together, but no one should then assume one causes the other to change. How do we know there is no direct causation? If there was a causation between time changes and major negative health outcomes, the millions of business people and tourists who fly across the Atlantic and Pacific every day would be dying in droves. It doesn’t happen, so there is no causation, just correlation. What does happen is jet lag, which is lousy but not fatal.

What is very real is an increase in things like accidents when driving or walking at night, so forcing commuters or children to do so costs lives. But remember, making it work in New York means it doesn’t work in Indianapolis! There are workarounds. People in Xinjiang keep Beijing time officially, but do all their scheduling on “local time.” The central time zone in Australia is on a half hour offset, as is Newfoundland & Labrador in Canada. But that involves relatively small groups of people and places without that much travel between them.

So if daylight saving time is so great, why not keep it permanently? It’s only great in Summer, when it maximizes your time outdoors in the sunshine. The US tried this in 1974, when Congress repealed the “fall back” time change during the Summer of that year , and President Nixon signed the bill into law. Seventy-five percent of American supported the measure. When Winter came, the new Summer-focused time failed miserably (darkness for school busses, for example), leading to a massive change in public opinion and the repeal of the repeal by then-President Ford in October, 1974.

Time doesn’t have to change. Time changes probably don’t save power, or fuel, but they also don’t make you sick. What they do, do, is maximize your access to plentiful sunlight in both Summer and Winter. If that’s important to you, embrace DST. Or move to Singapore. But please stop complaining!

Ecce Homo

I have heard it said that nothing brings home one’s mortality more than the death of one’s last remaining parent. You now stand at the door, looking into the abyss, with no comforting generational buffer between you and eternity. My Dad just passed on, but I don’t feel that way at all. I have many emotions: I am sad for the grief I sense in my wife, my children and grandchildren, and my siblings. I am relieved that Dad’s suffering is at an end. I am grateful for the life and upbringing he (and my Mom) gave me. Mostly I am proud of the Man he was.

Charles William Neary, Chuck (but never, ever “Chucky,”) was the eldest child of Charles Joseph and Loretta (Vollrath) Neary. He was born on June 4th, 1929, and he liked to insist the market crash was not his doing. That was Chuck, always quick with a quip. If he didn’t invent the concept of “dad jokes” he almost certainly perfected it.

The eldest of twelve siblings, he was in some respects an extra parent to the youngest ones. Like his father, he was a good enough athlete to entertain notions of being a player, but too grounded to pursue them. In the early twentieth century, boys played sports, men held jobs. He was a quick study, and even briefly attended the University of Notre Dame, but couldn’t hack working a union job at the local Bendix factory with his father, attending classes, and commuting from their home in distant LaPorte, Indiana. At the same time.

His father wanted him to stay and support the family; Chuck wanted to get married and leave. He could easily recall the epic fistfight he and his Dad had in front of the family home when he decided against his father’s will. Chuck enlisted in the Army; a way to leave with dignity while setting the stage to marry Delores. His brief stint in uniform was uneventful, and he returned to LaPorte with his bride, until the fateful day when he soon got another telegram from the War Department directing him to return to duty due to the Korean war.

GI Chuck

Chuck had learned to type in high school, so he was assigned as a personnel specialist to a division HQ. Through an accounting mis-classification, he found himself re-assigned as a combat infantryman just as the Chinese sent a million volunteers south to stop the United Nations advance. He never seemed traumatized by the months in combat, but he never talked that much about them, either. When he finally returned again to Indiana, he traded the olive drab of Army life for the navy blue of the Indiana State Police.

If the Irish cop is a stereotypical character, Chuck was straight from central casting. His had a wry sense of humor, was a quick and excellent judge of character, coupled with a friendly style that served him well. He lucked into a local starring role during the manhunt for a fugitive who killed a sheriff and eluded the police. Chuck literally chased him down in a foot race and became above-the-fold news in Chicagoland. He later helped pioneer a traffic speed enforcement program which placed police cars (driving the speed limit) abreast on highways; whoever tried to pass was arrested for speeding. One can’t print what he was called on the CB radios those days.

Sadly, he was as bad at office politics as he was good at policing. He found himself on the wrong end of several changes in leadership, stifled in his career and sometimes punished just for not taking sides. At one point, Chuck was sent to the ultimate dead-end job: the sole police officer assigned to investigate crimes within the Indiana State Prison. When I asked him once what was so bad about it, he said, “the victims are criminals, the witnesses are criminals, the perpetrators are criminals, everybody lies, and nobody really cares what happens.”

Trooper Neary

Chuck somehow survived that experience and got a fresh start as the Commanding Officer at a new post near Lowell, Indiana. He excelled in the leadership role, and eventually rose to headquarters in Indianapolis, where he was chief of investigations. He later admitted HQ was far too political a place for a no-nonsense detective like him. He retired from the force as an official “Legend of the Indiana State Police” although he continued to work security and investigatory jobs for years more.

When Delores became incapacitated after failing to rehab from a knee replacement, he became her full time care-giver. She refused a wheelchair or an electric scooter. He literally carried her around, or wheeled her from place to place in one of those chair/step-stool devices meant for home improvement jobs. He cared for her thusly till the day she died.

All those details are the stuff of his biography. They are things about him, but not him. What I could barely ever fathom was the “how” he was the “who” he was. Police work is legendarily the realm of workaholics, cops being on-call all day, every day. Yet Chuck was an omnipresent figure in my childhood: on the parish council, coaching the baseball team, running the school’s Presidential physical fitness test. At times I wished he wasn’t always around, like when he called me “Neary” so that he didn’t show any favoritism among the other team members. Perhaps the fact he often showed up in uniform was a detail I missed at the time: somehow he crammed thirty hours of activities into every twenty-four-hour day.

The man loved to drive, and he drove very fast. As a child I remember keeping tabs on how many cars he passed when we went on a long vacation drive. It exceeded a thousand. After all those years as a trooper, he was comfortable driving, and it was very hard to finally get his grip off the steering wheel. And yes, it’s genetic, just ask my daughters.

Chuck had a temper, and he could be overly strict. Between his upbringing and career, he tended to view the downside of things more than the positives: you can’t witness the worst of people and things all the time and not be affected. That manifested itself in views that were stereotypical and emblematic of his times. He fought to overcome the urge to voice thoughts which he later regretted, but you could see him struggling with the difference between what he thought and what he knew he shouldn’t say.

He was always his own man, very sure of who he was, and what he could or couldn’t do. If the man had a midlife crisis, it passed before lunch. If he pondered any existential dread, he shrugged it off with a so-what. His Catholic faith was enough for him.

He was clever, but always regretted not finishing a college degree. After a few beers on a Saturday afternoon, he once told me “being right all the time” was his biggest problem: “people resent it.” He was right about that, too. He probably didn’t realize how unusual that talent is.

In a modern twist on an Irish tradition, we loved to fight. Dad and I always engaged in battles of wits whenever we got together. Like the scene from his favorite movie “The Quiet Man,” we enjoyed the contest more than the result. I’d make an overly strong comment, Dad would object, and off we went. At times the argument would go on-and-on, each trying to find a new opening or point of attack. On more than a few occasions, we ended up completely changing sides during the argument: what mattered was the fight itself.

Chuck’s Dad died at sixty-three from a debilitating neurological disorder. The grandfather he never knew died at forty-two (kidney failure), great granddad at sixty-four (gastric ulcer). I once told him–based on our paternal history–my goal was to live to forty and anything more than that was “extra time.” Chuck lived to ninety-four, and I’m in year twenty-four of extra time. Maybe the genes aren’t all that bad.

In his final years, Chuck became a mainstay at his parish, then at his retirement community. He rediscovered his inner ham, playing the lead roles in several plays there. He found another chance at romance with Sharon, who was his companion and eventual caregiver to the end. His heart simply refused to stop beating although it declined from sixty-to-forty-to-twenty percent effective, and he needed to move into assisted living. When my sister asked him which facility he wanted to move to, he simply pointed up.

At 5:17 this past Tuesday morning, I woke up. I usually wake up around 6:00 am, a habit from years of military and government service. This was different. I went and said my morning prayers, then started my daily reading, when I got an e-mail from my brother-in-law asking that I call my sister immediately. Dad had hit the call button around 5:30, and had died shortly thereafter. I can’t help but think he gave me one last shove that morning, a little “get ready, you’re next in line.”

I loved the man, warts and all. His entire extended family, of which he was literally the paterfamilias, will miss him dearly.

Behold the Man.

A Mexican Cable Fable

One of the things making expat life such a phenomenon is the internet. No matter where you go, you can bring parts of your life with you: television shows, sports, even family connections. This access greatly mitigates the home-sickness any expat might feel living far away in a different culture. Of course the internet is (in the famous quote from the late-Senator Ted Stevens) “a series of tubes” through space. Tubes, cables, whatever. The ridiculous metaphor works on many levels, since a small series of cables is the lifeline which provides the whole world to your home. Yes, your telephone does it without cables and delivers it to the palm of your hand, but only a digital native wants to stare at a palm-sized screen all day.

When we arrived in Mexico, our first house had internet supplied by TelMex, the onetime Mexican government utility now owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. It was old-school copper, bundled with your landline, and you could get upwards of 20 Megabytes per second (mbs), enough to stream live television. Reliability was always an issue, with frequent outages and significant speed lags when more users logged in. Years behind the developed world, but good enough.

Eventually fiber optics came to Mexico. TelMex by law had to provide it to all customers, installed free of charge, but their roll-out plan was several years long. Our neighborhood paid to jump the queue, getting fiber optic cable installed early. Of course it was a classic negotiation: we had to pay to have it done, while those immediately around us declined to join in, getting the installation for free. Our neighborhood voted to go ahead, since we wanted the improved speeds (>50 mbs) and reliability. As for our other neighbors, it was just their good fortune to get access, too.

You might be wondering at the fiber optic speed, as in the States it would be in the hundreds of megabytes per second. Here, the fiber optic cable runs to a box in your neighborhood, but the last hundred feet or so are still copper cable into your house and modem, resulting in less performance. Fiber optic cable is expensive and delicate, so TelMex decided to take the performance reduction and avoid the problem of all that cable maintenance. I can’t say that I blame them. If you step on it, kink it, or otherwise molest it, fiber optic cable dies. Copper is far more resilient. You’ll see just how much more later.

Years later we moved into another house closer to the Ajijic centro, and the TelMex fiber optic was already in place there. We were all set for about a year, until the quality and the performance became unstable. It went out for days at a time, and when it worked, speeds dropped below one mbs (barely able to read e-mail) in the evening. Needless to say, television and streaming were out of the question.

We flagged down a TelMex vehicle in our neighborhood (that’s what you do here), and the technico (repairman) agreed to take a look. His instruments told him there was a signal getting through to our modem, but it was very weak, and there was something wrong down the line leading into the house. He showed me where our connection ran along our property line, then into a retaining wall and down to a junction box. The copper cable was stuck inside a broken, corroded plastic tube as protection: for all intents and purposes, it might as well have been lying on the ground. And in the junction box was a mass of extra cable, left there by the installers probably because they didn’t want to bring it back. It was a mess, and the technico couldn’t tell where the problem was, as he was primarily an “indoor” repairman, and this was clearly an “outdoor” problem. He worked for several hours identifying where the cables were, but could not help us any further. He even refused a propina (tip), as he said it was just his job. We weren’t excited about contacting TelMex for help, as we had heard plenty of stories of bad customer service.

Look closely, …
I don’t think this is up to code
Nope, certainly not right!

We had upcoming travel, so we delayed contacting TelMex. We adapted and endured for a few months. I started using the internet early in the morning, when there was sufficient bandwidth. Judy & I shared time, to make sure we both weren’t trying to use the same few mbs. We sometimes used our phones, even for hotpots, but our T-mobile unlimited international plan throttles you down to 2- or 3-G speed when you are outside the States. We made do. Finally, the internet connection went out completely, and we had to contact TelMex for help.

Judy used the app (en español) to alert them to the problem and what their technico previously had told us. She lost the chat before she completed it, and thought she may have to start over. When she did the next day, they informed her that we already had a trouble ticket and would see a repairman shortly. At least they didn’t say, “mañana.” The next day, he alerted us he was coming and arrived late in the afternoon. He confirmed we had no connection, and I showed him the cable and the junction box. He inspected the cables, and while he agreed they weren’t protected properly, he said the problem must be further up the line.

He walked along until he found the appropriate utility culvert and opened it up. Inside there was another mass of cables, and another junction box for the incoming fiber optic cable. The tunnel was full of dirt, water and an ant colony, the latter quite upset their secure complex was disturbed! The technico brushed all this off (he had seen worse, obviously) and picked up the fiber optic cable, half of which was sticking loose out of the junction box. You could see the cut open ends of the cable and the light shining through! How it got that way he didn’t know; he seemed amazed anybody in our neighborhood had internet with that connection. He told us he needed to return the next day with more equipment and a partner to help test the re-installation.

Late the next afternoon, they started in on the junction box, cleaning the leads and reconnecting the cable. After about two hours, he came up to the house to say they were done, and our internet connection should be restored. It was: a bounteous 50+ mbs! Yes, we still see pretty substantial changes in speed, and brief outages. And we’ve purchased a Starlink dish as satellite backup. And no, the TelMex workers still refused a propina.

Lessons learned? Internet access is a key component to expat life. We bank, connect to family, plan travel, and socialize using it. TelMex customer service was very good. They were willing to speak slowly in Spanish, and happy we could understand and respond. Things like internet speeds are relative, and you can live with much less than sizzling. Global internet access continues to increase. It is amazing to me we’re using the same satellite system (Starlink) as a back-up that the Ukrainian army is using to fight the Russians, but that’s the nature of technology today. Sometimes old tech like copper wires has its uses, especially if the new tech like fiber optics is fragile.

Nothing momentous, just another aspect of life as an expat.

The End of History

Most of my friends will immediately recognize this title, that of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 nonfiction book about what comes after the Cold War. When published, it was a sensation, although the number of people who actually read the magazine article summarizing it greatly exceeded those who waded through his 339 pages of dense politics and philosophy. I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Fukuyama for a private lunch one day (benefit of working in the Pentagon), so I was obliged to be in the latter group. With the benefit of that experience, I can strongly recommend the article, as the gist of his argument is there.

No, I wasn’t kidding!

Frank’s work was widely ridiculed–again, by those who never read all of it–after the 9/11 attacks. He didn’t predict an end to conflict, just the fact that the Cold War proved two things: freedom is better than authoritarianism as a governmental system, and capitalism is best at economic production. Those truths have stood the test of time since he wrote them. But those who stopped at the bumper sticker (history is over, end of story) just didn’t get it. They didn’t know history, and they were wrong because of it.

I used to think not knowing history was practically criminal. For example, I would hear people say, “why do I need to know who went to war with whom?” (they never got the who/whom part right, but that’s a different argument for a different day). I often quipped back with a quote from Leon Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Otherwise peaceable Palestinians who lived in Gaza are suddenly realizing what happens when someone starts a ruinous war on your behalf. You don’t get to opt out, you just get to suffer. But lately I’ve decided there is something worse than not knowing history; it’s learning bad history.

See, if you don’t know something about history, you can honestly learn about it and fill in the gaps. But if you have been taught something about history that is either factually incorrect or seriously biased, you’ll continue to insist you’re correct. You will resist the correction. Several current examples suffice:

Kissinger’s War Crimes.

Henry Kissinger recently passed. To say he was controversial is an understatement, as much as it would be to say he was important. Yet most of the press coverage focused on the allegation he promoted or encouraged various war crimes. The most prominent of these charges was that he extended the Vietnam war by “carpet bombing” neutral Cambodia, killing tens of thousands and undermining the Cambodian government so that it fell to the vicious Khmer Rouge. These are three factual statements, although seriously shaded to hide the truth. Kissinger did promote the extension of the war by bombing Cambodia. Many people did die in those attacks, although the number is suspect for reasons I will explain. The Cambodian government did collapse under attack by the Khmer Rouge. What is the bias?

The main supply line between North Vietnam and the Viet Cong guerrillas in the south was the famous Ho Chi Minh trail, a network of roads and jungle paths in Cambodia which paralleled the border. Note the bolding in Cambodia. The US bombing didn’t extend the war into Cambodia; the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) extended the war into Cambodia. The US Air Force simply followed. As to casualty figures, the Air Force was largely bombing jungle trails, so it used carpet-bombing tactics. The idea that tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians were wandering these trails night after night, when they knew bombs were falling, strains credulity. While most of the people killed were just doing a job, moving things from here-to-there, they were involved in the war effort. Finally, the US went on to support a coup d’etat which replaced Cambodian King Sihanouk with General Lon Nol, but neither leader was able to resist the Khmer Rouge, who overran Phnom Penh just as the NVA overran Saigon. Cambodia’s fall was as inevitable as South Vietnam’s.

Bombing an area militarized by an opponent is not a war crime (a lesson being recalled currently in Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, and schools). Neither is killing civilians engaged in combat support efforts. And the postwar history of the Khmer Rouge demonstrates there are things worse than US meddling. Kissinger’s legacy deserves a critical assessment, but war crimes? Sorry, no.

The Nakba.

Many press reports covering the “bigger picture” of the current war in Gaza mention the Nakba. The term means catastrophe in Arabic, and it is used as a descriptive nickname for what happened to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. As the media “contextualized” the story, the nascent Jewish state forced a little less than a million Palestinians from their homes and turned them into stateless refugees. Again, it’s a factual statement, but leaves the full truth wanting. These stories remind me of my visit to Hiroshima two decades ago. As I walked into the Peace Museum, I was struck by the story it told: on a bright, sunny day, people were going peacefully about their lives when suddenly a thousand suns exploded above them. Seriously, no mention of the war going on, the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanjing, the brutality of the Bataan death march or the various atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. Just rainbows and unicorns and BOOM. Missing something?

In a similar fashion, the Nakba was preceded by the Palestinian Arabs rejecting the UN two-state solution and joining with five Arab armies in an attempt to kill all the Jews and destroy the Israeli state. They failed and were forced to flee. At the same time, several hundred thousand Jews were expelled from Arab countries where they had lived for centuries, and they primarily went to Israel for protection. A catastrophe? Yes. Traumatic? Of course. But this is what happens when you attempt to eradicate a people and fail; they simply won’t return to the peace table until their security is ensured. But the many pro-Palestinian protests you see at American universities stem from teaching only the Nakba, not the rest. Which is why many students draw the wrong conclusions.

The 1619 project.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project is an attempt at re-evaluating all American history by tracing our roots not to 1776, but to 1619, the beginning of English chattel slavery in Virginia. The New York Times News division (not Opinion) promotes the project, suggesting they see it as historical fact, not simply an alternative view. There is an associated educational curriculum being used by primary and secondary schools across the nation. The crux of the project is that race, and specifically race-based slavery, is the appropriate prism to view the development of the United States. In the end, everything is about race. The American Revolution? Designed to protect southern slavery against the British abolitionist movement. The Second Amendment? Arms citizen-slave owners against possible slave revolts. America’s police system? Drawn from the fugitive slave patrols. America’s justice system? Incarceration of black men to prevent their development, just as in the old South. American capitalism? From the Plantations. I could go on, but you get the point.

Many professional historians have pointed out the serious fallacies in these arguments. Some proponents of the 1619 Project have backed off, suggesting they only wanted more–and more serious–consideration of race. Who can argue with that? But that’s not what they put forward. These factually wrong ideas are now out there, circulating in the young minds of America. We’ll see more incoherent and violent results in years to come.

Think not? As I wrote this post, the Economist covered a new poll of Americans 18-29. Not youths, young adults. Twenty percent thought the Holocaust was a myth. Another thirty percent couldn’t say whether the Holocaust was a myth (or not). And the results didn’t adjust by education: that is, having an American college degree didn’t make you more knowledgeable about the truth. How could that be? Secondary school history curriculum is perfunctory, and if you cover the Nakba, are you going to cover the Holocaust? It gets worse in college, where educators increasingly teach critical theory focused on oppressers-and-oppressed, leaving Israel in the former group. Which begets the ill-informed pro-Hamas rallies on today’s campuses.

Want to argue whether Henry Kissinger’s narrow focus on the Cold War was brilliant or myopic? Worthwhile. Does the Israeli war against Hamas end up radicalizing more Palestinians than there are now? Good question. What is the lasting effect of slavery on modern America? Start the debate! The examples I cite aren’t designed to illuminate, but to confuse. They stake out extreme positions, lacking context or just being plain wrong.

War & Morality

As I write this, Israel is pounding the Gaza strip with munitions, and starting its ground offensive into the tiny, heavily-urbanized area. Several Arab states, news networks, and pro-Palestinian groups have already called these actions “war crimes.” Others have stated the current conflict must take account of the decades of Israeli “occupation” of formerly Palestinian territory, as well as the degraded treatment of the Palestinian people therein. The UN Secretary General opined people need to understand “the context” of the current war. A US State Department employee resigned in protest over the US provision of weapons to Israel, citing the fact such weapons “could be used for war crimes.” And even the President of the United States, while maintaining total support for Israel’s right to self-defense, has voiced “concerns” over the conduct of ground operations in the Gaza strip.

The Catholic theologians (and Saints) Augustine and Thomas Aquinas put forward the basic principles of Just War theory, Augustine in the 5th century later embellished by Aquinas in the 12th. Those principles have stood the test of time, being codified in various international treaties and conventions. There are two fundamental questions: whether the war itself is “just” and whether the war is being conducted “justly.” The points are independent: you can fight a just war unjustly, and you can fight an unjust war justly. Let’s examine whether Israel is engaged in a just war, and whether it is conducting it “justly.”

The principles of a just war (jus ad bellum, for those who had Latin inflicted upon them) are thus:

  • Just Cause. The damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave and certain. Here there is little doubt that the terror attack of October 7th qualifies.
  • Proper Authority. War may only be declared by a legitimate government on behalf of its people. The Israeli administration at the moment of the attacks was quite divisive, but in a true show of support, all sides formed a national unity government to declare and conduct the war.
  • Right Intention. The purpose of the war must be the stated intention, not masking another motivation. This is always tricky. The stated purpose of Israel’s war is to eliminate Hamas, and that would qualify as just. Some claim Israel really wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza, or kill Palestinians, citing remarks by some Israeli officials. The final answer here must wait, but the stated intent suffices in the meantime.
  • Last resort. All peaceful alternatives must be exhausted, ineffective, or impractical. Given that Israel has left Hamas to run Gaza for more than a decade of missile barrages and terror attacks, resulting in only more of the same, this point is met.
  • Proportionality. The good achieved must not be outweighed by the harm done. Another tricky one. Ending Hamas’ reign of terror for Israel AND for the Palestinians in Gaza is a pretty big deal, but it can’t come at the cost of destroying all of Gaza, either. Israel has not suggested the latter, so they again meet the standard. But it must also be understood that this criterion is not some absolute check on military force: there is no such thing as a hostage-veto or an innocent victim-veto on war.
  • Probability of success. There must be a reasonable chance of achieving the war’s stated purpose. Few doubt the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) abilities here; many question the relative costs.

By these standards, Israel is engaging in a just war. This determination can be reviewed, for example, if a secret Israeli memo came to light calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people rather than simply Hamas. But claiming this is their intent is insufficient.

But is Israel conducting this war justly? Here are the criteria for fighting a war justly (jus in bello):

From the New York Times: Dark orange represents new strikes by IDF
  • Discrimination. Armies should fight armies, and strive not to intentionally inflict harm on non-combatants. The IDF directed Palestinians to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza strip. While many humanitarian organizations decried the 48 hour deadline Israel announced, in fact the IDF waited weeks before ground operations commenced. Notifying civilians where they should not be also tells Hamas where the attack will come, so the IDF has gone above and beyond initially. Compare that to Hamas, which ordered Palestinians to stay in place. What about the thousands of IDF strikes in Gaza since the October 7th terrorist attack? Hamas (and other groups) have continued to launch rockets and missiles in response, so they retain some offensive capability. Video footage shows the results, but also attests to the fact that the Israelis are using precision-strike munitions to take down individual buildings. Even the pattern of destruction demonstrates the bombings are part of a coordinated effort to assist the ground operation, establish a new buffer zone, and isolate Hamas fighters, all legitimate targets. So the IDF is currently meeting this standard for fighting justly.
  • Due proportion. Combatants must use only the means necessary to achieve their objectives. This principle is best explained at the extreme. For example, the IDF almost certainly has tactical nuclear weapons. They could blast Hamas and the entire Gaza strip into nothingness with a round or two, accomplishing their stated objective of eliminating Hamas but at an inhumane cost in innocent life. In the real world, this principle is much more debatable. What about the 8,000+ (and growing) list of Palestinians who have already been killed since October 7th? First off, this total is supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Many aid agencies claim that past data provided by Hamas has been accurate. There are two problems with this claim. First, the data does not indicate if the deceased were members of Hamas: so it mixes innocent civilians with legitimate military targets. Second, this same ministry immediately blamed the IDF for the explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, claiming 500 people died. The ministry provided no evidence of the casualties, nor of the bomb. Subsequent analysis by several news organizations and the US Intelligence Community concluded the explosion was not an IDF strike, was most likely caused by a malfunctioning Palestinian rocket, and the casualty counts were inflated.

During the initial attack on October 7th, over 1,200 Jews were killed and over 4,200 were injured. Even accepting the Hamas data, the IDF has thus far met the standard of proportionality. The debate about proportionality will be an ongoing one as the war continues.

Even if Israel has met the technical standards for starting a just war and is currently fighting it justly, what about the larger claims of Israeli occupation and mistreatment of the Palestinians? Much is made of the Israeli total blockade of Gaza. However, international law permits Israel to ensure no military resources enter Gaza, and Hamas admits it has food and fuel stockpiles which it is not sharing with the Palestinians. Hamas has also rejected US and Israeli offers of humanitarian aid. Likewise, Israel does not control the flow of refugees out of Gaza; Egypt does, as does Hamas. No Arab nation has (as of yet) agreed to accept Palestinian refugees from Gaza. One further point which merits consideration: Hamas has denied that its attackers committed any atrocities on October 7th, despite video evidence to the contrary. Hamas further claims that “average Palestinians” rose up on October 7th and took revenge on the Jews, committing the atrocities shown in the videos. So those who claim Hamas is trustworthy must admit that “average Palestinians” perhaps are not as peace-loving as depicted by some. Finally, Hamas admits it holds hundreds of innocent hostages in violation of international law.

From the New York Times: Blue arrows show initial IDF advances. The red line at the bottom is the wadi el Gaza, a marshy area which divides the Gaza strip

How will the IDF ground attack play out? As this map shows, the IDF will most likely occupy the area around the wadi al Gaza, which splits the Gaza strip in two. They will then reduce (military term) the area north of the wadi by destroying any remaining Hamas fighters, who will be cut-off from Hamas supplies and leadership south of the wadi. Once Hamas in this area is destroyed, Israel will declare this northern half of Gaza as a demilitarized zone under international authority (probably inviting the UN to administer it). Palestinians would be invited to return to this area, after being checked for Hamas affiliation. Israel will establish a new border zone, probably about two kilometers into the Gaza strip, which the IDF will treat as a free-fire zone complete with mines, obstacles, and walls (several layers). Any person or thing moving into this zone will be targeted and eliminated. All this could take months.

What happens after that depends on how the first phase goes. Does Israel then reduce the southern portion of Gaza, up to the Egyptian border? If the first phase went well, with fewer casualties and destruction, perhaps so. Does Israel invite non-Hamas Palestinians from the southern portion of Gaza to return? Does it give Hamas safe passage out, as it did with Yassir Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization when Israel besieged them in Beirut in 1982? If there is widespread destruction and international outrage, perhaps the Israeli government chooses this option. And once Hamas is gone and the threat Gaza posed neutralized, the Israeli government has a lot of soul-searching to do about its failure to anticipate the attack, to respond quickly and to come to grips with how Jewish or secular a nation it chooses to be. Certainly the Netanyahu government faces an accounting.

What of the Palestinians in Gaza? It is true that peace cannot be achieved by the Israeli eradication of Hamas. Peace can only happen when Palestinian leaders are honest with their own people and accept the following, which are all facts on the ground:

  • Israel is a Jewish state, and it has a right to exist.
  • Because of its long history of violent resistance, a future Palestinian state must be demilitarized, and may not be a base for attacks against Israel.
  • Jerusalem will remain a part of (and the capital city of) Israel, while peaceful Muslims will be free to worship at the al-Aqsa mosque complex.
  • Eventually, the strong, militarized border between Israel and Palestine may become more like a normal border between normal countries.

That’s it. If the Palestinians had accepted the initial UN offer, they would have had much more, including part of Jerusalem. If they had accepted the Oslo accords in 1993, they might have avoided the walls which now enclose them. If Gazans had not turned to Hamas, they would have avoided the destruction which now engulfs them. At every inflection point, the Palestinian people have made the wrong choice. Here’s a prayer they finally make the right choice now.