Precognition: Deja Vu All Over Again

Below is my column for The Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine for the October issue as submitted to the editor.  Time moves on and even this is a little dated though we are still doing some non-genius level stuff in Syria.

Precognition; Déjà vu all over again

By Richard Morchoe

In 2002 Steven Spielberg made the movie Minority Report based on a Philip K. Dick short story of similar name.  It was a popular film and Dick’s idea is disturbing.   It is that crimes that will be committed in the future can be discerned beforehand.  

According to the story, three mutant idiot-savants, or precogs foresee all serious infractions and arrests can be made in advance, thus sparing society any harm.

Philip K. Dick was a science fiction author more popular in death than in life.  Of course, his prediction from The Minority Report has not come to pass.  We as of yet do not have even one “precog.”

Or do we?

This is not to say necessarily that National Security Advisor John Bolton is an idiot-savant, but he has been threatening to strike Syria in response to something that has not happened.

The U.S. Air Force has bombed Syrian military facilities to teach them a lesson for chemical attacks for which there was spurious evidence but no concrete proof.  Now, Bolton figures the regime might try to do something we don’t know they will or will not do, and we shall bomb for that.  Confused?  You should be.

Bolton has said we are going to take action if Assad uses chemical weapons to bomb the Idlib region, the last refuge of mostly hardcore jihadists.

A few years ago, Assad looked like he could be toppled.  Then he received assistance from the Russians and Iranians and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.   Better than that, he reformulated his army into an effective force that would be difficult to defeat.

On the verge of victory, the last thing he would need to do is use chemical weapons.  They are not effective in battle and would be an excuse for US intervention.  So, what is going on?

Bashar Assad has just about won his war and will reunite the Syrian nation.  To the United States, that is terrible because he is the worst head of state to have ever lived, and why not?  He has to be the worst because we got rid of the last two contenders for that title, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi.  Never mind that we made those two locales places of despair, we would do better in Syria because we say so.

When we kicked over Hussein in Iraq, the Shia, who had been ruled by him were now the majority in government.  At that point, the hot shots at State realized that we had empowered the co-religionists of Iran.  The Iranian Shia religious leaders were the other meanest people who ever lived.  What to do now?

In a prodigious feat of overthinking, we kind of changed sides.  Way back in 2007 Seymour Hersh, whose memoir Reporter is reviewed in this issue, published an article in the New Yorker with the title “The Redirection.”  Nothing ominous there, but the sub-headline, “Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” should have set alarm bells going off amongst the erudite audience of that highbrow journal.

Up on Long Hill, we were a bit slower on the uptake.  It was not until the September, 2013 issue that we noticed there had been a change.  Indeed, the mortal enemy who had slain our fellow citizens in two towers was now tacitly our ally.

We noted the new circumstances with the words from George Orwell’s 1984:

“At just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia.  Oceania was at war with Eastasia.  Eurasia was an ally.

There was of course no admission that any change had taken place.  Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.”

Our recent history is even more ominous as there was not a statement of who we are in alliance with.  There was the mention of the “Free Syrian Army" a tiny, secularist band of heroes that we would train and arm.  Post-instruction, their weapons would mysteriously appear in the hands of hard-core Jihadis.  That’s okay as long as they were fighting the new bogeyman, Assad.

Does it make any sense?

Less and less to the average American.  Back in January, a group called the Committee for a Responsible Foreign Policy ran a poll and the results showed the public was “Overwhelmingly Opposed to Endless US Military Interventions.”  There is little groundswell for war, even though the mass media is pushing it.  One could be forgiven for thinking that “Chemical Weapons” is Syrian for “Weapons of Mass Destruction” with the same level of evidentiary proof.

The American attitude should not be surprising.  The last three presidents have been “peace” candidates until elected.  The younger Bush campaigned calling for a modest foreign policy.  Obama lampooned Iraq as a “dumb” war.  Trump called for getting along with Russia and not making a worse mess in Syria.

The late John McCain never saw a war he didn’t like and ran in that vein.  Hilary was far more a war candidate than the Donald.  They both lost.

The people have an idea what they want and the winners agree but only until the votes are counted.

If there is a war party, it is not popular with the citizenry.  To get them on board, they have to be propagandized, which is why the mainstream press is always telling us that Assad is diabolical.

In the abovementioned Hersh memoir, the author had meetings with the Syrian leader.  Hersh never made him out to be Mother Teresa, but reported on him as a rational interlocutor.  So why the desire for the man’s blood?

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson thinks he knows.  Wilkerson was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the time of the Yellow Cake disaster and that situation led to disillusionment.  Wilkerson, now a professor at William & Mary, warned in an interview on Tuesday, September 11 that “the neoconservative agenda” for an escalated United States war on Syria followed by war on Iran has had a “resurrection” in President Donald Trump’s administration.”

From administration rhetoric, speculation that that is the plan is not unreasonable.   Backing al Nusra, an al Qaeda front In Idlib is only the excuse to defeat Iran in Syria.  Embedded in that ointment is a fly.  That fly is Russia.  Bolton seems to think baiting the Russkies is without cost.

Who knows, it may be.  Turkey shot down a Russian Plane and US forces killed Russian mercenaries in Syria at Deir al-Zour.  The night before this was written, a Russian plane with troops aboard was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft fire due to an incursion in Syrian air space by Israeli planes.

Russia has to get to it or fold and admit they are not a world power.  If they decide enough is enough and stop being long suffering, the reductio ad absurdum will be nuclear war, and we shall get there.

So far, despite media propaganda, Putin has been the adult in the room.  On Long Hill, we hope he can pull it off again.

Here’s hoping this is not the last issue of The Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine.

Sire, the intellectuals are revolting - Review of The Death of Expertise.

Below is the review of The Death of Expertise by Thomas Nichols as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the June 2018 issue.  It has some good points, but from Mr. Nichols twitter posts, it is apparent he is a neocon and there is a theme of follow us experts, even if we occasionally err and start a dumb war.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters by Thomas M. Nichols

Consumers of news programs might be surprised to learn expertise is dying.  After all, on television and radio and in print there is a surfeit of men and women who hold themselves out as possessed of special skill and are willing to discuss or indoctrinate at length on whatever arcane branch of knowledge they claim.

According to Tom Nichols there is a problem. His The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters documents the crisis.

Have graduate schools been shuttered by a regime bent on suppressing intellectual inquiry?  Not at all.  The problem is more that the non-experts do not properly defer to the specialist caste

Tom Nichols is an expert.  Many of the talking heads infesting the airwaves with the claim are not.  The author has a long list of credentials that include degrees and posts of importance.  Currently, he is a Professor at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI.  He also teaches at the Harvard Extension School.  Even more impressive, Nichols is an undefeated five-time Jeopardy winner.

Professor Nichols does provide example after example to prove his case.  He tells us we need experts well versed in their disciplines. 

He is especially upset with people who, after a google search, call out accomplished professionals with superficial online knowledge.  The anti-vaccine movement comes in for his ire.  A few celebrities get a hold of an idea and soon the usual inoculations we all got are questioned by people with law degrees and acting credits.  It is hysteria and he is dead on with that and other examples.

The problem is, it is not as new as Tom might have it.  There has always been something coming along to attack established knowledge.  Sometimes it actually turns out to be valid but more often, it is just a fad, and oft a dangerous one, but it is not new.

It was about 1975 and I had a passenger in my cab who wanted to tell me about a cancer treatment that what passed for big pharma at the time wanted to suppress.  The quack cure that was Laetrile was big and in its day, went as “viral” as could happen back then.  I had heard about it as it was hard to avoid and was at least thankful my fare was not a Moonie trying to convert me. 

Before the internet, the country was filled with mass fads such as new age crystals and bookstores had shelves filled with the self-help tomes that came and went.  In those primitive times the world was going to end because of “acid rain.”

Tom is a smart guy and a man as knowledgeable as he is should not be a victim of presentism.  Neither should we dismiss his concerns out of hand.  The internet, unlike the stacks in the library, will give us an answer in seconds.  Research is easy and easily wrong, but without technology, intellectual mischief is still possible.

Where he is on solid ground is his chapter on education.  The 34-page section amplifies the findings of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education reviewed in the April issue of this magazine.   

According to Tom, “““College graduate” today means a lot of things.  Unfortunately, “a person of demonstrated educational achievement” is not always one of them.”  After stating that, he then goes on to praise the university system for its strengths before getting back to what’s wrong.

Mass education means that there is an increasing “commodification” of college. Attendees are treated as “clients rather than as students”.  He is right, but it could not be otherwise in a buyer’s market.

Nichols teaches at the Naval War College in Newport and is thus more aware of the college scene in Rhode Island.  His observation as to what goes on at the most prestigious school in our sister state may be representative:

“Parents of students at Brown University, for example are shelling out some serious money so their children can take part in things like “Campus Nudity Week.” (One female Brown participant said in 2013 that “the negative feedback” about the event “has helped prepare her for life after college.”  One can only hope.)”

As to what college has become for many all over the country he quotes a graduate of a California party school about, “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.”

Spending a good deal of time in the Pioneer Valley, your reviewer can attest to the truth of what the author writes about.  The college towns of Amherst, Northampton and South Hadley seem nothing so much as a theme park, an academic Disney World.  The locales are saturated with bars, restaurants and trendy shops.  There is an occasional bookstore, but hardly an overabundance.

Surely, however, the young are learning and will be able to carry on as experts to replace Tom and his class as the next generation.  Nichols’ writing does not inspire confidence.

The student today, he notes, sees him or herself as the professor’s equal.  They are insulted by a bad grade or correction. Undergrads expect professors to be available 24/7 via email and are demanding in tone on that medium.

Add to that grade inflation, almost everyone gets an A, and it does not bode well for the future of expertise.

Expertise itself is defended by the author vigorously.  He does admit that the cognoscenti are not without error.  Sometimes it as if he is saying, on the one hand we need the big thinkers, on the other hand, boy, can they blow it.  So why the book and why now?

Nichols was part of the nevertrump movement.  Trump, as he illustrates in Pages 211 through 213 was the anti-intellectual candidate.  As a member of the class of heavy thinkers, he would naturally be against the yahoo.  That does not mean Tom does not have a case.

The professor admits to his mistakes as an expert on Russia, but notes he was too young to be part of the prior cohort in the field who failed to see the fragility and coming demise of the Soviet Union.  A little research outside the book reveals that he was for the 2003 Iraq invasion.  Nichols does not really cover that other than to say that public skepticism is warranted when people who got that wrong return to give advice.  Ya think, Tom?

In fact, the vast majority of intellectuals were for the invasion and few if any careers suffered for their foolishness.  The great unwashed have every right to be skeptical, if not downright cynical about their betters.

Can we do without a stratum of intellectuals studying the great issues of the day?  You might think your reviewer is calling for “off with their heads.” 

No, as flawed as they may be, they are a necessary component of the body politic.  A road map tells us our position on land.  Political scientists, social scientists and historians and others tell us our position in time and in history.

We just have to remember their predictive track record will never be anywhere near flawless.