Modern architecture

When ideology trumps ability and artistic vision

Authoritarianism in Cement and Steel

The ideals of the modernists? Totalitarianism and the view of Man as a termite or even bacterium was implicit in everything that they said and every­thing that they did: and again, I do not see how anybody could fail to see a totalitarian sensibility in their architecture. Le Corbusier detested the street because it escaped the supposedly “rational” control of the bureaucratic planner. The very year after four million people had fled the advancing Nazis, he saw fit in a little book to advocate the expulsion of millions of people from Paris because he, the great architect, saw no reason why they should be there. He wanted to park them instead in the countryside so that they could hew wood and draw water, as was (in his elevated opinion) their proper destiny. If this is idealism, I’ll have none of it.
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The charge against modernism is not that it represented a changeCurl is specifically an admirer of all the great and varied architectural achievements of the past, not only European, and has published widely on thembut that it represented a revolutionary change for the worse, a destructive force such that a single one of its productions could (and often did) ruin a townscape built up over centuries. It was this egotistical indifference to what already existed, as well as utter lack of humanity, that was so aesthetically, and one might add psychologically, devastating in England and elsewhere.

Indifference? Or an unthinking hostility to what already exists married to an overwhelming Will to Power?

Robert Conquest:

'Intelligentsia' is, of course, a Russian word. The condition of being an intelligent was defined not by intelligence but by the acceptance of the Idea -- so given, with the capital letter, and defined as the total destruction of the existing order and its replacement by a perfect society run by none other than the intelligentsia.

Roger Scruton:

Architects, who once were servants of the people who employed them, and conscious contributors to a shared public space, have rebranded themselves as self-expressive artists, whose works are not designed to fit in to a prior urban fabric, but to stand out as tributes to the creative urge that gave rise to them. Their meaning is not "we" but "I," and the "I" in question gets bigger with every new design.

Gehry belongs to a small and exclusive club of "starchitects," who specialize in designing buildings that stand out from their surroundings, so as to shock the passerby and become causes célèbres. They thrive on controversy, since it enables them to posture as original artists in a world of ignorant philistines. And their contempt for ordinary opinion is amplified by all attempts to prevent them from achieving their primary purpose, which is to scatter our cities with blemishes that bear their unmistakable trademark. Most of these starchitects -- Daniel Libeskind, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas -h ave equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledygook, with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it. And when people are spending public money they will be easily influenced by gobbledygook that flatters them into believing that they are spending it on some original and world-changing masterpiece.

GK Chesterton:

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.

Anthony Daniels:

The word intellectual, by the way, does not imply high intellect, which the holy trinity of modernism, Gropius, Mies and Corbusier, certainly did not possess. What they possessed instead were psychopathic ambition, ruthlessness and a talent for self-promotion.

Tom Wolfe:

Le Corbusier's instincts for the compund era were flawless. Early on, he seemed to comprehend what became an axiom of artistic competition in the twentieth century. Namely, that the ambitious young artist must join a 'movement,' a 'school' an ism-- which is to say, a compound. He is either willing to join a clerisy and subscribe to its codes and theories or he gives up all hope of prestige.

Lionel Trilling:

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties and of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding

Related:

The Birth of the Hive mind

The Hive mind revisited

A prolific yet almost forgotten serial killer

A really informative 2 part podcast from True Crime Garage

The Candyman

Dean Corll, for a variety of reasons, is not nearly as well known as the Zodiac Killer or Ted Bundy. Yet he ranks as one of the most sadistic and prolific serial killers in US history.

This article by Skip Hollandsworth is one of the best pieces of reporting I've ever read.

The Lost Boys

Lest We Forget

Richard Holmes:

As far as Britain and her dominions were concerned the Western Front was the most costly event of modern history, and we remain touched by its long cold shadow.

Gary Sheffield:

To argue that the world in 1919 would have been a better place if the Great War had not taken place, or more parochially, if Britain had not become involved, misses the point. A German victory in the First World War would have produced a situation significantly worse than the imperfect “real” world of 1919. The First World War was a just and necessary war fought against a militarist, aggressive autocracy. In Britain and the United States it is a forgotten victory. It has remained forgotten for too long.

John Mosier:

In September, the AEF had about five thousand soldiers killed outright, and in October the number climbed to twenty-two thousand. The American cemtery at Romagnes-sous-Montfaucon had 14, 240 graves; it is bigger than the cemetary at Normandy.

Winston Churchill and the Secret World

Nigel West, (ed.) Churchill's Secret Spy Files

Winston Churchill loved spies, commandos, and all things covert. So it was no surprise that as Prime Minister he had a vast appetite for reports from his spy chiefs. He was also an inveterate meddler. So it is no surprise that he spent a lot of time listening to, prodding, and making suggestions to his spymasters and shadow warriors.

Decades later we are still learning a great deal about this aspect of the Second World War. (The British government is notoriously slow to release documents especially when they involve their secret services.)

A recent book offers another peek behind curtain. Churchill’s Spy Files does not provide any bombshell revelations but it does add a few more tiles to the historical mosaic. It also reinforces several well-established themes.

The spy files in question were monthly reports from the Security Service (MI5) which were submitted only to Churchill. As the editor (Nigel West) notes this allowed the authors to be candid in these summaries because no on expected the public to ever see them.

(Although their candor had its limits. The authors all skilled bureaucrats and academics were obviously trying to place their work in the most positive light. The reports dwell on successes and deal with failures only when forced to by events.)

Nonetheless, MI5 made a good record in the war. Germany had little success penetrating the vital parts of the British war machine. On the contrary, MI5 managed to capture and turn around every agent sent to Britain. This enabled them to mount one of the greatest disinformation efforts in history--the XX system. Their efforts were vital to the success of the Normandy landings.

Neither James Bond nor the Imitation Game

The controlled double agents did more that pass disinformation to the German intelligence agencies. Their messages also were a source of ‘cribs’ that Bletchley Park could use in their efforts to discover the daily settings on the Enigma machines. Further, the questions Germany asked their spies could, when collated and analyzed, offer clues about Germany’s knowledge of her enemies and provide hints about the Reich’s future actions.

As noted previously, a successful intelligence war is not waged by lone spies breaking into safes nor by solitary geniuses breaking codes with will and sheer brain power.

Britian's secret weapon in the war against Hitler

German arrogance and German failures

Not every officer in German intelligence was duped by the XX operation. The high command, though, was unwilling to even consider the possibility that their organization could be duped by the British:

They also told him the story of a major in the German Secret Service in Berlin who had suggested to his superiors that the agents in England were under British control but was sacked for this suggestion within 24 hours.

In this the Abwehr was no different than the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine which refused to believe that their encrypted communications could be broken. As we now know, their confidence was not justified.

When the secret world was really secret

Nearly all of the participants in this effort kept their secrets after the war was over. Even the PM himself felt bound to silence.

The paradox is that although Churchill proved the past master of exploiting SIGINT, he exercised unusual discretion when he supervised the compilation of his magnum opus, The Second World War, published in six volumes between 1948 and 1954, which made no reference to double-agents, wireless intercepts or even FORTITUDE. Although Churchill had wanted to include mention of ULTRA and its influence on the conflict, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges, and ‘C’, Sir Stewart Menzies, had prevailed upon him to refrain from disclosure on the grounds that the techniques employed were still operational.

The “need to know” principle was maintained with a vengeance during the war. Churchill, for instance, likely never knew the real names of celebrated agents GARBO and TRICYCLE. Often, a spy case would be months old before it appeared in these monthly reports.

Extreme secrecy was absolutely vital to the success of the XX system. But such secrecy also allowed intelligence agencies to hide their failures and fatal missteps. West notes that Churchill was probably never aware of the full extent of the disaster suffered by the Special Operations Executive in the Low Countries.

Stalin may have known more about these operations than Churchill did

While MI5 and MI6 did a great job keeping secrets from the Germans and from the British public, their overall record was far from perfect. Even as they reveled in their success running double agents against the Germans, they were oblivious to the fact that the Soviets had placed their own double agents in the heart of the XX system. In fact, the reports were compiled and written by Anthony Blunta member of the Cambridge spy ring.

The ticklish task of selecting cases for submission to Churchill was assigned by Liddell to his trusted assistant, Anthony Blunt, who must have relished the prospect of being given a pretext to range far and wide across the Security Service, and elsewhere, to assemble the appropriate material for the Prime Minister. Few spies in history could ever have been presented with such a spectacular opportunity to call for files, question colleagues and demand briefings on topics that would otherwise be completely outside the ambit of his duties. Quite simply, Blunt, who had been a Soviet agent since 1936, was granted a licence to delve into just about any operational issue that caught his interest.

The essence of strategy

This is a succinct piece on strategy that is packed with insight.

The Big Lies of Strategy

The first thing to keep in mind about strategy is that it is not all that complex. You should keep it simple and always remember that, put simply, strategy is about choices.

RTWT

Related:

Strategic problems and the problem with strategy

The real fake news

This is very good because it is very true:

The History Of The Future

I attend way more conferences than is healthy. I've been averaging about 12 of these a year, as speaking at these things is part of my business. I hear all kinds of hysterical and provocative predictions for the future. The one thing I don't hear is anything that turns out to be true.
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If you're a marketing genius with a terrible track record, the future is a great place to hide.

This same phenomenon has established a firm foothold in most of the respectable media:

The other day, on a Sunday, what was it? -- a week ago Sunday, I think, and I picked up The New York Times, and there, page one, there were seven stories on page one. I counted them. And now in the old days -- old only being 10 or 15 years ago -- the news journalistic philosophy was that you would give a snapshot of the world in the previous 24 hours: What happened yesterday all over the world? But the other Sunday, I picked up the paper and I looked at the seven page-one stories and not one story had a yesterday or a last night in the lead. All seven stories were about something that will happen or might happen or conceivably could happen some time in the future. Well, it's a different kind of journalism.

(John Corry, 1994)

The plague is even worse in cable news and in sports programming. Often more time is wasted on endless speculation and pointless predictions than is devoted to actual news reporting.

There is a bunch of reasons why this happens. For one thing, it is easier to support a narrative with speculation than with facts. Facts have an ugly way of undercutting preferred narratives (see, “Hands up, don’t shoot”). In addition, it is an easy way to fill air time; cheap and easy are the bedrock foundations of cable’s current business model. (See Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze )

Michael Crichton: “Why Speculate” (2002)

If speculation is worthless, why is there so much of it? Is it because people want it? I don’t think so. I myself speculate that media has turned to speculation for media’s own reasons. So now let’s consider the advantages of speculation from a media standpoint.

It’s incredibly cheap. Talk is cheap. And speculation shows are the cheapest thing you can put on television, They’re almost as cheap as running a test pattern. Speculation requires no research, no big staff. Minimal set. Just get the talking host, book the talking guestsof which there is no shortageand you’re done! Instant show. No reporters in different cities around the world, no film crews on location. No deadlines, no footage to edit, no editors…nothing! Just talk. Cheap. You can’t lose. Even though the speculation is correct only by chance, which means you are wrong at least 50% of the time, nobody remembers and therefore nobody cares. You are never accountable. The audience does not remember yesterday, let alone last week, or last month. Media exists in the eternal now, this minute, this crisis, this talking head, this column, this speculation.

Before Immelt at GE, there was Doug Ivester at Coke

Following a legendary CEO is hard

Robert Goizueta at Coke was another superstar CEO of the 1990s whose hand-picked successor failed.

What Really Happened At Coke

A couple of things distinguish this case from GE’s epic fall.

1. Warren Buffet and Co. pulled the trigger more quickly than the stockholders at GE. They did not fight the problem, they made a decision.

2. The succession plan at Coke failed, at least in part, because of the unexpected illness and premature death of the outgoing CEO.

How could so brilliant a CEO as Roberto Goizueta have dialed such a wrong number? Simple. Goizueta was planning on living a long life, stepping back into the role of chairman, and letting Ivester run the company with his discreet guidance. It probably would have worked. Ivester was indeed a brilliant No. 2.

In a very real sense, Ivester’s stumbles should be a warning for other CEOs and Corporate America in general. He was the very model of the modern CEO in the era of Big Data:

Analytical and data-driven, Ivester spent heavily on technology for the quick and efficient delivery of vast amounts of information. His goal was to make Coke the ultimate Learning Organization, and he made his case convincingly. A year and a half ago FORTUNE conjectured, "Ivester may give us a glimpse of the 21st-century CEO, who marshals data and manages people in a way no pre-Information Age executive ever did or could."

Peter Drucker was quite astute in perceiving the false promise of Big Data (even though he died before the term reached buzz word status for fad-surfing CEOs.)  In a 1998 article for Forbes ASAP (“The Next Information Revolution”) he noted that the various computer revolutions had ended in disappointment for one simple reason:

For top management tasks, information technology so far has been a producers of data rather than a producer of information-- let alone a producer of new and different questions and new and different strategies.
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It can be argued that the computer and the data flow it made possible, including the new information concepts, actually have done more harm than good to business management. They have aggravated what all along has been management's degenerative tendency, especially in big corporations: to focus inward on costs and efforts, rather than outward on opportunities, changes, and threats. this tendency is becoming increasingly dangerous considering the globalization of economies and industries, the rapid changes in markets and in consumer behavior, the crisscrossing of technologies across traditional industry lines, and the increasing instability of currencies. The more inside information top management gets, the more it will need to balance it with outside information-- and that does not exist as yet.

MORE DATA will not turn a private sector bureaucrat into a dynamic entrepreneurial leader.

MORE DATA will not create innovations.

MORE DATA is rarely what is required to decide thorny problems at the strategic level.

MORE DATA will not prepare an organization for Black Swan events.

To the contrary, the demand for more detailed data will let executives continue to fight the problem and avoid deciding it. MORE DATA all too often means delay and squandered opportunities. (In every competitive market, time is a critical though often ignored dimension.)

The blue-est of the blue chips is looking pretty faded

GE slashes dividend, takes $22 billion charge in 3Q

The precipitous fall of GE seems like it deserves more attention. This is not your average corporate failure. This is a story with Shakespearean drama and a host of important questions.

Under Jack Welch GE was the gold-standard for corporate performance and management practices. It routinely appeared at the top of the lists of the Largest, the Most Admired, and the Most Profitable companies. Then, his hand-picked successor led it to ruin.

Jeff Immelt ‘destroyed’ General Electric: Ken Langone

GE CEO feud: Welch vs. Immelt

Questions worth investigating:

Is Immelt’s failure a reflection on the management training system Welch instituted and made famous?

Does the hiring of an OUTSIDE CEO (the first in company history) reflect on Welch or Immelt? Is it further evidence that the Welch system was flawed or did Immelt gut/destroy/burn down his predecessor’s legacy?

What does the crash of GE say about business journalism? Did they over-praise Welch? What did they miss about Immelt and his strategies?

A case study on organizational learning

Great interview with the author of a new book

THE U.S. NAVY AS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION WITH TRENT HONE

Hone examines how the so-called New Navy of the twentieth century managed innovation and transformed doctrine in an era of rapidly changing technology, first emphasizing a centralized fleet's massed gunfire, and later the coordination of dispersed aircraft carrier task forces. He argues"the Navy's surface warfare doctrine in the first half of the twentieth century was an example of sustained and repeated innovation" and uses this evolving doctrine to examine "organizational development through the lens of complexity."

This is a subject of great, long-standing interest to this blog:

Military Schools and Business Education

Tarawa II: Learning and doing

Coping with a VUCA world

How a crude cocktail changed history

Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Keeping his crew hydrated and non-mutinous was no easy task for a captain in the age of sail. The water, stored in casks, quickly became evil-looking and vile-tasting. Then, there was need to carry enough alcohol to keep crew in a tolerable state of sullenness.

When Europeans began distilling alcohol, it meant ships could carry the hard stuff instead the more bulky wine or beer. The Royal Navy switched from beer to rum and then grog. The French navy swapped wine to eau-de-vie.

Turns out, this was a very big deal.

Grog, was 1 part rum mixed with 4 parts water AND LIME JUICE added for flavor. The daily ration 2.5 pints of grog versus the old ration of a gallon of beer.

And now, for the rest of the story:

The use of grog in place of beer played an unseen role during the eighteenth century in establishing British supremacy at sea. One of the main causes of death among sailors at the time was scurvy, a wasting disease that is now known to be caused by a lack of vitamin C. The best way to prevent it, discovered and forgotten many times during the eighteenth century, was to administer regular doses of lemon or lime juice. The inclusion of lemon or lime juice in grog, made compulsory in 1795, therefore reduced the incidence of scurvy dramatically. And since beer contains no vitamin C, switching from beer to grog made British crews far healthier overall. The opposite was true of their French counterparts, for whom the standard drink ration was not beer but three quarters of a liter of wine (the equivalent of a modern bottle). On long cruises, this ration was replaced by three- sixteenths of a liter of eau-de-vie. Since wine contains small amounts of vitamin C but eau-de-vie does not, the effect was to reduce the French navy's resistance to scurvy, just as the Royal Navy's resistance was increasing. The Royal Navy's unique ability to combat scurvy was said by one naval physician to have doubled its performance and contributed directly to Britain's eventual defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805.
Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience

Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise:

In a word, then, Freud had launched a pseudoscience-- that is, a nominally scientific enterprise that is so faulty at the core that it cannot afford to submit its hypotheses for unsparing peer review by the wider community, but must resort to provisos that forestall any possibility of refutation.. And despite some well-intentioned efforts at reform, a pseudoscience is what psychoanalysis has remained.

And this seems especially relevant today:

The potential for mass havoc from 'memory' - based accusations is thus no smaller today than it was in the seventeenth century. In fact, it is incomparably greater, thanks to the power of our sensation-seeking media to spread the illness instantaneously from one town or region to another.

Related:

Don’t confuse us with the facts

We owe Salem an apology

They trusted the experts

You can't expect much history in "historical dramas" when SJWs are in charge.

A proper old-fashioned stinker: ITV’s The Bletchley Circle – San Francisco reviewed

After just one episode, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV, Wednesday) seems certain to stand out from the crowd. In an age when most television dramas range from the perfectly fine to the extremely good, it already looks like a proper old-fashioned stinker.

Admittedly, one of its more obvious problems is bang up-to-date: by adhering so spinelessly to the mantra of ‘women and black people good, white men bad’, the programme not only creates an overwhelmingly dreary sense of déjà vu, it also deprives itself of any possibility of genuine dramatic tension. But there are plenty of more traditional flaws too, including such classics as wooden dialogue, leaden humour and a plot of impressively po-faced preposterousness.

I watched the first two seasons of "The Bletchley Circle" and tried the third season on BritBox. I could not get past the first episode for all the reasons outlined in the article.

Related:

As their Weemsy takes them

"... who controls the present controls the past."

A new book on an almost forgotten economist

Undeservedly forgotten I might add.

Great review here:

The Virtues of the Market: Wilhelm Röpke as a Cultural Economist

More than other economists Röpke was willing to engage fully with the cultural dimension (and the religious dimension about which this book is curiously silent) of liberalism and markets. This meant that he was skeptical that liberal institutions had much of a chance in the absence of bourgeois and Christian culture. An unpopular point to make also in his day and age, and one that did not sit easily with his liberal universalism, but a point hard to ignore after Western attempts to spread democracy and markets which have invariably run into serious trouble.

This makes me think that Ropke might be just the economist we need in the Age of Amazon, Google, and the SJW nomenklatura.

With sympathies for both (European) political integration and a high degree of federalism. It makes him an original critic of monopolies: they are bad not only because they harm consumers, but also because they represent an unhealthy degree of concentration in the economy, with harmful social and cultural effects. He favored the small firm, exemplified by the independent farmer and artisan. It was an economic structure which he found in Switzerland, where he lived the latter half of his life, from 1937 to his passing in 1966.

Perhaps in theory, as in practice, Switzerland is better than Chicago.

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies"

Revisiting the 2008 Financial Crash

What Have We Learned Since Bagehot?

Ben Bernanke told an attentive Brookings Institution audience earlier this month, that, after he became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, in 2006, “Literally one of the first things I did was to ask the staff to give me the handbook or what you do in the case of a financial crisis, and they provided me a little notebook, typed on a manual typewriter and mimeographed, about four pages in it, and it said, ‘Open the discount window.’ And that was about it…. Tim Geithner had a similar experience at the New York Fed, and so we went into one of the complicated and consequential crises in human history with very little in the way of playbook for thinking about how to address the crisis.”

Related:

Coping with a VUCA world

A catastrophic failure of imagination

What was the Fed thinking in the summer of 2008?

It's a shame that we don't have any way to prepare for dealing with crises and unexpected events.

Wargames and crisis management

“Wargaming in the Classroom”

Military Schools and Business Education

Strategy and Execution: Business and the Military

The ultimate in victim-blaming

When your movie turns the murder victims into the bad guys.

‘Lizzie’ Celebrates Murder As Feminist Empowerment

The film is designed to celebrate Borden’s 18 axe blows to her stepmother and the 10 or 11 to her father as feminist empowerment. For this to work, the film-makers follow the time-honored tradition of making the villain of the piece, her father, so detestable that any violence done to him, no matter how savage, is justified.
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“Lizzie” is pitched to the politically correct crowd, with their views that murder is justified if it is committed by the oppressed. To do this, the film departs from key facts.

A man to remember

The same officer who supervised the miraculous evacuation of the British Army at Dunkirk was also the officer responsible for deploying the Mulberry Harbors at Normandy and laying the cross-Channel PLUTO pipeline.*

Meet Captain William Tennant

There is a poetic symetry to his career. Grit and determination in the dark days of the war. Perseverence in the face of defeat.. And, after four years of trials, he gets to make an outsized contribution to victory .

As Professor David Gelernter wrote:

History is inspiring. Bravery is inspiring. It is shameful we no longer teach this to our children.

* I wrote about the critical role the Mulberries played in the defeat of the Wehrmacht here:

"If we can’t capture a port, we must take one with us.”

One more reason it is OK to distrust advice from academic experts

Why much of academic business research remains irrelevant for business

Much of the evidence we gathered suggests that academic research is largely self-referential because the system of prestige, funding allocation and career progression remains largely centred on notions of scholarly impact related to publications. To put it bluntly, authors are faced with two options: undertaking socially impactful research (i.e. research that solves critical problems for businesses, governments or civil society organisations) or writing academically impactful publications (i.e. based on research that fits into popular academic debates and is likely to be cited by those engaged in those debates). The latter option merely requires a thorough knowledge of the literature. By contrast, the first option requires a good understanding of practical problems; some connections with non-academic organisations; and often the time, ability and desire to negotiate and manage long-term research collaborations that may or may not result in four-star publications. It may well be, as Catherine Durose has argued previously, that “some commentators see academic practice as a refuge from engagement”, but for many others the return on investment simply does not stack up.

Speaking of hard-boiled detectives

Max Allan Collins:

Mickey Spillane at 100

This was something entirely new in mystery fiction, and Spillane quickly became the most popular—and controversial—mystery writer of the mid twentieth century. In addition to creating an eye-for-an-eye hero, the writer brought a new level of sex and violence to the genre. He was called a fascist by left-leaning critics and a libertine by right-leaning ones. In between were millions of readers who turned Spillane’s first six Hammer novels into the bestselling private eye novels of all time.
...
Mike Hammer paved the way for James Bond and every tough action P.I., cop, lone avenger, and government agent who followed, from Shaft to Billy Jack, from Dirty Harry to Jack Bauer. The latest Hammer-style heroes include an unlikely one—the vengeance-driven young woman of the Dragon Tattoo trilogy—as well as a more obvious descendent, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher.

Related:

So long, pal. Mickey Spillane, RIP

Hard-boiled versus cozy mysteries

Jay Catherman:

In a cozy mystery novel, you have an amateur sleuth standing over a neatly laid out corpse, with a cat sleeping on the mantel, and water on the boil for tea.

In a hard-boiled mystery novel, the detective is some sort of professional sleuth, the mutilated corpse is hanging from the fireplace and the cat is boiling in the kettle.

The Battle of Britain

During the long, hot summer of 1940, over the wheat fields and orchards of Kent and Sussex, strategic theory encountered logistical and organizational reality. It was not just the emotion-charged images -- of aircraft's vapor trails entangled across a clear blue sky, of St. Paul's Cathedral standing out above the flames, of Churchill visiting the bombed-out houses of Londoners -- that counted. The struggle also consolidated the resolve of the British to soldier on, and had enormous effects upon foreign opinion abroad, especially in neutral America. Strategically, it was also the first time the Nazi juggernaut had been checked.

Paul Kennedy,

Engineers of Victory

Related:

Six weeks that saved the world

The forgotten man who saved the world

Field Marshal Dowding's verdict on the Battle of Britain

Remember General Stanley McChrystal?

General McChrystal’s military career ended after Michael Hastings revealed that his staff was contemptuous of many leading figures in the Obama Administration. All right thinking Journolisters agreed that no healthy republic could tolerate this challenge to the duly elected President.

Now we see the legacy press and the Beltway punditcracy celebrating career bureaucrats working to thwart President Trump. Somehow, mocking Joe Biden a threat to our democracy, but bureaucrats actively working trying to overthrow an election is just fine.

"Senior Administration Official" Admits There's a Deep State in the White House "Thwarting" Trump

One could draw the same contrast between Gen. David Petraeus and James Comey. Both mishandled sensitive information. Only one faced criminal penalties; the other became a hero to the MSM for breaking his oath.

Patrick Blackett and the innovation trap

When the search for technological breakthroughs is nothing more than way to avoid hard work and difficult choices.

Patrick Blackett was not a congregant in the Church of the Next New Thing. In 1941 he warned Britain’s war leaders against a pernicious form of Magical thinking:

"New weapons for old" is apt to become a very popular cry. The success of some new devices has led to a new form of escapism which runs somewhat thus-- "Our present equipment doesn't work very well; training is bad, supply is poor, spare parts non-existent. let's have an entirely new gadget!" ... In general, one might conclude that relatively too much scientific effort has been expended hitherto in the production of new devices and too little in the proper use of what we have got.

This is a remarkable assessment from a man whose work as an experimental physicist earned him a Nobel Prize.

It also has the advantage of being true.

The search for “breakthrough innovations” is often an expensive way to avoid dealing with difficulties in the here and now: A charade that wastes time and money with no chance for a payoff.

It is appealing to think that a few brilliant people can come up with an idea that will save an organization. (How did that work out for Xerox?) It is even more tempting to think that such an idea can come from a random collection of people using the latest fad for idea generation.

After reviewing the successes and failures of military innovation between the world wars, Allan Millett came to this conclusion:

The key to technological exploitation became not so much the revolutionary character of inventions and processes, but creation of a management and logistical system that made the application of technological advantage possible.

Simply put, the greatest technical breakthroughs in the world cannot overcome organizational weaknesses in strategy, doctrine, management, or logistics.

Related:

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (Part Two)

Conquest's Law

That vision thing

Speaking of Gen. Marshall

Two paradoxes.

A career staff officer and educator, with only a few months of wartime experience, he had deep insights into the qualities needed by commanders at a time of revolutionary change in military affairs.

He was a man renowned for his taciturn demeanor and refusal to seek the spotlight. Yet, he gave us a treasure trove of pithy sayings and useful anecdotes.

Take this one which relates directly to the previous post:

Don’t fight the problem, decide it.

There is a lot of wisdom in each half of this statement. “Fighting” a problem is a terrible temptation. Facing up to disagreeable facts is hard; it is easy to convince yourself that maybe things are not so dire. Maybe there is a way to avoid hard choices.

In addition, fighting the problem nitpicking the data, asking for more analysis, ‘waiting for the situation to become clearer” is also a good way to avoid taking responsibility for a tough decision while giving the illusion of action and diligence.

Note, also, that Marshall did not say “solve the problem”. This is the trap that many smart people fall into. Rather than choosing a messy, imperfect solution, they delay decision, (and hence, action) in an endless search for the clean, elegant solution.

Before anyone had heard of the OODA loop, Marshall understood that in the modern world speed of decision was a key success factor.

And this is where we close the loop back to Blackett’s advice. Silence is often the greatest contribution someone can make when the speed of decision and a bias for action are what matters.

An expert’s advice to experts about giving advice

Patrick Blackett won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948. During World War Two he played a large role in Britain’s victory in the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic. Yet Blackett did not invent new weapons nor was he a major part of the Manhattan project where most of the great physicists ended up.

As head of “Blackett’s Circus” he brought the systematic thinking at the heart of the scientific method to the knotty problems of military strategy and operations. His work is often credited with creating modern Operations Research. Blackett thought that men like himself could “encourage the use of numerical thinking in operational matters and so [could] help to avoid the running of the war on gusts of emotion.”

One of Churchill’s strengths as a war leader was his willingness (eagerness?) to force the military services to give scientific experts a hearing. During the crucial meetings on the Blitz and the U-boat war, men like Blackett and Lord Cherwell were in the room --- and as more than silent observers.

Blackett, for his part, was neither self-effacing nor devoid of opinions. Yet, he promoted reticence as a virtue for experts who did not bear the burden of command. As he put it:

His job is to improve matters if he can, and if he cannot, to say nothing.

Blackett’s advice shows that he understood the difference between the roles of the executive and the advisor. The intellectual, the expert, the pundit, lives in a world where debate is a job requirement, elegant complexity is valued over crude simplicity, and where time may be a scarce commodity but it is rarely a critical factor. The statesman and the military commander operate in a much different universe. As Henry Kissinger wrote in Diplomacy:

The responsibility of statesmen … is to resolve complexity rather than to contemplate it

Recall Gen. George Marshall’s lament to Eisenhower in the dark days after Pearl Harbor:

Eisenhower, the Department is filled with able men who analyze the problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.

Novelists and Rosenhan

Charles Dickens:

[The police] took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract idea from the circumstances.

Great Expectations

Arthur Conan Doyle

The trouble, however, with all police prosecutions is that, having once got what they imagine to be their man, they are not very open to any line of investigation which might lead to other conclusions. Everything that will not fit into the official theory is liable to be excluded.

The Case of Oscar Slater

Related:

Criminal justice and the Rosenhan Experiment

Rosenhan revisited: The persistence of error and the impotence of facts

Rosenhan redux

Revisiting the Hanssen case

Rosenhan revisited, again

They trusted the experts

Factcheck: True

'Well, you have a point there,' grunted the rewrite man. 'I've been reading the stories those buzzards are filing, and it occurs to me that there is no more vicious bigot than a city intellectual contemplating someone to whom he feels intellectually or morally superior.'
Sharyn McCrumb, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

They still don't get it

Or maybe they do and just don't dare admit it

Interesting review by Nick Carr of a revealing new book-Trump and the Media

Media democratization and the rise of Trump

If there is a way out of the crisis, it may lie in Fred Turner's critical reexamination of past assumptions about the structure and influence of media. Just as we failed to see that democratization could subvert democracy, we may have overlooked the strengths of the mass-media news organization in protecting democracy. Professional gatekeepers have their flaws - they can narrow the range of views presented to the public, and they can stifle voices that should be heard - yet through the exercise of their professionalism they also temper the uglier tendencies of human nature. They make it less likely that ignorance, gullibility, and prejudice will poison our conversations and warp our politics.

Note-The "crisis" is the fact that Hillary Clinton was not allowed to become president.

When a journalist talks about "democracy" what they really mean is "mediated democracy" where Deciders and Experts carefully "curate" the choices put before the public.

PowerLine, where I first found the term, captures the essence of "mediated democracy":

We live in a political system that has not yet been adequately described, but one might call it a "mediated democracy." Mediated by a self-appointed, generally ignorant but highly opinionated "elite" that is not elite by any conventional measure-income, intelligence, education, social position-but that successfully dictates the terms of political discourse even though it no longer controls (exclusively, anyway) the means of production of the news.

(For journalists and academics to speak of Democracy when they really mean this bastardized version is truly Orwellian. Fascists and Stalinists can readily accept the form while arguing about where to draw the line between acceptable and forbidden opinion. A true democrat like G. K. Chesterton would laugh the writers right out of the room.)

Journalists and academics think democracy is in crisis because the voters - darn them - bypassed the Mediators and neutered the Deciders.

Here's a key point that undercuts the "Russia hacked the election" hysteria that has seized hold of the minds of Journalistic Deciders and Mediating Experts:

Keith N. Hampton, of Michigan State University, finds "no evidence" that any of the widely acknowledged malignancies of social media, from fake news to filter bubbles, "worked in favor of a particular presidential candidate." Drawing on exit polls, he shows that most demographic groups voted pretty much the same in 2016 as they had in the Obama-Romney race of 2012. The one group that exhibited a large and possibly decisive shift from the Democratic to the Republican candidate were white voters without college degrees. Yet these voters, surveys reveal, are also the least likely to spend a lot of time online or to be active on social media. It's unfair to blame Twitter or Facebook for Trump's victory, Hampton suggests, if the swing voters weren't on Twitter or Facebook.

This is something the MSM probably hopes we forget:

Trump's Twitter account may have been monitored by only a small portion of the public, but it was followed, religiously, by journalists, pundits, and politicos. The novelty and frequent abrasiveness of the tweets - they broke all the rules of decorum for presidential campaigns - mesmerized the chattering class throughout the primaries and the general election campaign, fueling a frenzy of retweets, replies, and hashtags. Social media's biggest echo chamber turned out to be the traditional media elite.

Related:

Journalists and Twitter redux

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Why Twitter?

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Digital isolation and inadvertent anonymity

In I Murdered My Library, Linda Grant recounts her experience downsizing her living space and the resulting massive reduction in her home library. A lifelong reader, journalist, and novelist she had spent decades collecting books. (As every reader knows, books are always collected, never “hoarded”.) Now she faced the the melancholy task of disposing of most of her library.

According to Vincent Starrett “when we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” For book lovers, the act of shrinking a library is, in some sense, to deplete one’s happiness treasury. For Grant, this personal sense of loss is coupled with the literary professional’s larger concern that fewer and fewer people share her love for books while a growing segment of the population actively hates them

Estate agents do not think that books furnish a room books make rooms look messy. Books’ multi-coloured spines muddle and muddy the Farrow & Ball neutral paint colours, the Ammonite and Hardwick White and Savage Ground. They completely destroy the impact of the accent wall.
…
[Books] are the detritus not just of the digital revolution but of disposable living and small houses.

Thanks to technology, Grant can shrink the space devoted to her library while retaining many of her favorite titles. At first, like most of us, the ebook is a thrilling, liberating marvel.

As I began to buy more ebooks, I felt a sense of surprise and delight and wonder that I could carry around a library in my pocket.

Over time, however, she discovers that even great New Things have limitations and pitfalls. Some are obvious and quickly encountered. Books may be the ultimate “always on” technology; Kindles, not so much:

I’m going to hell, a hell in which eternity is a Kindle with a dead battery.

There are other, subtler effects of a pocket-sized library:

I experienced the sense that I was making my library partly invisible.

As most readers know, this is no minor thing:

Michael Dirda:

Books don’t just furnish a room. A personal library is reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know. When I was growing up, there used to be an impressive librarian’s guide entitled Living with Books. I think that’s the right idea. Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you.

Umberto Eco:

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Edith Nesbit

There is no bond like having read and liked the same books.

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V. S. Naipal

As is often the case, the most interesting discussion is over at Steve Sailer’s.

I’ve not read much of his work, but even a small dose was enough to convince me that Naipaul, like Tom Wolfe, was that most fearsome of men the intelligent outsider who notices things. And, again like Wolfe, he was not afraid to point out absurdities and pretensions when they came to his attention.

Wolfe had Leonard Bernstein, the Black Panthers, and Radical Chic. Naipaul had Michael X aka Michael Abdul Malik aka Michael de Frietas: Hustler, criminal, pimp, revolutionary, cult leader, murderer.

Michael X knew a good hustle when he found one and he pounced like the good predator he was:

At every stage of his career he was supported by some kind of jargon and could refer his actions to some kind of revolutionary ideal.

Naipaul is actually more interested in his enablers and Michael X had many. The Observer praised him as an “authentic voice of black bitterness”. John Lennon visited his commune in Trinadad and would go on to pay for his defense attorney, William Kunstler. The “Save Michael X” movement drew in the usual suspects like Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, and Kate Millet.

Naipaul is unsparing in his assessment of these frivolous people playacting with degenerate ideas :

That section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with 'revolution' as with the theater.
...
Those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men … to a cause, the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centers of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.

Thought for the day

Photographers hate to be photographed. Surgeons require nearly twice the amount of anesthesia ordinary patients require to undergo surgery. Journalists are the least receptive to professional scrutiny by their colleagues.

Renata Adler
Gone: the Last Days of the New Yorker

A less bleak view of the future of the newspaper

David Warsh has been an astute observer/explainer of the news business for decades. I've learned a great deal from reading his columns (for instance, the concept of "explanation space" is his).

So this is well worth pondering:

The Future of Reliable News

The biggest and best newspapers have survived and begun to prosper again, albeit in a low-key way, precisely because advertisers pay much more to reach readers of print than for fleeting digital impressions before online readers. I don’t see proprietary numbers, and newspapers shape and guard fairly carefully what information they release. But there is more reason than ever to think that healthy print circulation is the basis of a strong digital business.

He may well be right.

Then again....

MSM: Shrinking Audience, Leftward Drift

A badge of honor, but maybe not the best business model

The past is prologue

Politicized intelligence and the drums of war

Musings II … The “Intelligence Community,” “Russian Interference,” and Due Diligence

If even half of this post by Amb. Jack Matlock is true, it is a severe indictment of Clapper, Brennan and Comey.

In fact, the report was prepared by a group of analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by “two dozen or so analysts—hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies.” If you can hand-pick the analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their careers by not delivering?

What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.

He pulls no punches in his conclusion:

Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of “Russian interference” in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries.

RTWT

Important

A little background from the author:

News Values

A vitally important piece of the history of US/Russian relations is just being memory-holed. I hope many people read this book.

Respected editor (NY Times alum) both defends and condemns doxxing

Is she too stupid to understand simple words and concepts?

Does she really think she lives in a quasi-feudal system where her class has special privileges?

Or is she a thorough-going SJW who thinks impartial rules need to be replaced with Lenin's "Who-whom"?

Doxing is revealing a person’s private information: home address, telephone number, etc. Identifying a popular anonymous troll by name is NOT doxing.

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) June 5, 2018

Yes, the HuffPo is a sleazy left-wing click-bait site. But:

1. It is a Popular click-bait site and it is not treated as sleazy by the MSM guild.

2. It's editor-in-chief is a former reporter and editor at the New York Times. Which may tell us something about the ethics/ideology of the Times.

3. It is owned by Verizon. It is not a fly-by-night operation.

The Brooks-Sailer boundary

How the Deciders decide what you should read:

This explains why David Brooks writes for the New York Times and Steve Sailer does not

William Rusher to William F. Buckley:

I recently read somewhere a little homily to the effect that if a person makes us think we're thinking, we love him; but if he makes us think, we hate him. Take your choice-- and then make up your mind to take the consequences.

Why the Times editors like David Brooks:

In 2003, Brooks got a call from New York Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins inviting him to lunch. Collins was looking for a conservative to replace outgoing columnist William Safire, but one who understood how liberals think. “I was looking for the kind of conservative writer that wouldn’t make our readers shriek and throw the paper out the window,” says Collins. “He was perfect.”