After reflecting on Iran’s attack on Israel over the weekend, I arrived at some possible conclusions.

The first, widely lauded in the West, is that Iran’s missiles and drones aren’t as good as Israel’s anti-missile defenses.

It is being reported that U. S., British, Jordanian, and French aircraft took part in the defense against the Iranian attack. If true, it suggests one of two things, either a) those countries have been defending Israeli airspace for some time or, more likely, we had good intelligence about the actual timing of the Iranian attack.

We have also learned that Iran can attack Israel pretty much any time it cares to. We have suspected that for some time but this attack confirms it.

There are some other things we haven’t learned. We haven’t learned, for example, that Iran has “shot its wad”, as an old Navy friend of mine used to say. Maybe it has maybe it hasn’t.

Iran’s reported foreign reserves of $75 billion could pay for a lot of missiles and drones. Therefore we haven’t learned that Iran will not engage in attritional attacks against Israel.

We haven’t learned whether Israel required U. S., British, Jordanian, and French support to repel the attack.

We haven’t learned whether Israel would be as successful in defending against simultaneous missile and drone attacks from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and maybe even Iraq.

I am hearing some assertions that this attack demonstrates that we need to “isolate Iran”. I have few ideas on how that might be accomplished. It is my understanding that 90% or more of Iran’s oil exports go to China and I am confident that China and North Korea will continue to be delighted to sell missiles and drones to Iran. Not to mention those they produce domestically.

We haven’t learned (yet) whether Israel will respond to the attack. I suspect it will.

What else have we learned or not learned from Iran’s attack on Israel?

I found Joachim Klement’s analysis of the pragmatic effects of the Trump era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on business tax rates distressing, to say the least. The short version is that the effects were to increase taxes on many more companies, mostly small companies, than it decreased them for:

In the end, companies that are barely profitable and often have years when they make a loss were the big losers of the tax reform. Large corporations did just fine while small business owners got to pick up the bill.

I have made no secret of my opinion of corporate income taxes: I think they should be abolished. Increase the personal income tax to make up the difference in revenue if you will. Better yet abolish the income tax entirely in favor of a prebated value-added tax, prebated at different rates based on income to assure progressivity. Corporate income taxes are too inefficient and, as Mr. Klement’s analysis supports, can be used as a weapon by big companies against their smaller competitors.

I see some common threads running through the pieces I have been reading today. The first is that I don’t see proper consideration being given to the possibility that there are some people who want to wield power over others not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. That is not original to me. It has been said by philosophers and psychologists over centuries.

The second is just how devoid of pragmatic considerations so much of the policy discussions are. It is an increasing Aristotelian world. Things are right or wrong, black or white, good or evil. There is insufficient consideration to whether the policies being proposed are effective or ineffective.

Update

I neglected to mention the third common thread I’m seeing: everything is being viewed through the prism of domestic politics. Does it help Trump/Biden or hurt? Republicans or Democrats? The actual value of policies gets short shrift.

I found this conversation between Yascha Mounk and Vinay Prasad at Persuasion about the U. S. policy response to COVID-19 thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

I just want to be clear: My criticism is not a referendum on your involvement in all this, it’s not about your article, which I think was perfectly reasonable to have written at the time. And it’s really a criticism of the people who are in charge of the policy. I think Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci were aware that many scientists disagreed with their point of view. They held zero debates on the topic. They refused to entertain those opinions. We have emails from Francis Collins saying, when he read the Great Barrington Declaration, “We need a quick and devastating take-down” of this. He didn’t write an email saying, “Maybe we should have some public discussions and put these on YouTube and let people hear the pros and cons to this.”

I think there were plenty of people at the time who were opposed to these measures. Jeff Flier and I wrote some articles critical of this early in the pandemic saying that we need to listen to scientists from different points of view and we need to think about all the negative consequences of lockdown. We had data from China very early on that it essentially had no lethality in young people. There is a rate of death in people under the age of 18, but it is so fleetingly low it makes no sense to restrict their movements and restrict their school given the value of school. But the bigger point is that it seems like Monday morning quarterbacking because the people who set the policy squelched all attempts at any dissenting opinion and did not allow the public to hear the points of view of people who disagreed at the time.

I don’t entirely agree with their remarks. In some cases I think they’re being too lenient and in others too critical. Additionally, I think they ignore the “Politician’s Syllogism”. As an example of “too critical” IMO I believe they’re too critical of the shortcomings of facemasks as a strategy. As I said from the start, I suspect that there are differences between the use of masks in a healthcare setting and their use in, say, a grocery store not to mention on the street or on the beach.

As an example of “too lenient”, I have very strong opinions of appointed officials who lie knowingly to the American people. I think they should be punished very harshly.

I particularly found this assessment of the futility of our initial efforts interesting:

Could this disease ever have been contained? Maybe, but only if China had been cooperative early in December of 2019. I think by January and February, the horse was out of the barn. It’s a highly contagious virus. It had seeded the entire globe. By March, I think we had widespread transmission in every continent. And so I think containment was always not possible. There are some people who believed in Zero-COVID even in June and July in 2021. They thought we could stop all transmission. I think that was incredibly naive. COVID-19 has animal reservoirs; we had data that it infected the majority of white-tailed deer, for instance, in Michigan. It’s affected other animal species. Containment, I think, was not an option from the moment in which US policymakers took it seriously.

I understood that containment was futile the first time I saw a group of five or six Chicago police officers huddling together closely without facemasks of any kind or any attempt at “social distancing”. When the enforcers of public order aren’t maintaining that order among themselves, it’s all just kabuki, just for show. It’s abusive.

Well over 60 years ago my mom planted jonquils at our house on Winding Brook. After she died and her house was sold (a story in itself), one of my siblings considerately dug up some of the bulbs and sent them to all of us. As you can see my mother’s jonquils are flourishing in our yard now.

When my wife and I die I hope that someone digs them up and sends them to one (or more) of my nieces and nephews or their children.

The news of the day is that Iran has fired (they say) 300 missiles and drones at Israel. The world is on tenterhooks waiting to see whether and how Israel will respond. A few observations.

To my eye President Biden has seized the worst of his possible courses of action. After telling the Iranians not to attack Israel which they went ahead and did anyway he apparently is telling the Israelis a) we stand by them and b) don’t retaliate against Iran. It combines futility with the impression of weakness. Better by far just to maintain a low profile. I recognize that such a course is counter-intuitive for a politician.

Any notion that the Gulf States will come to Iran’s aid should Israel counter-attack is far-fetched in my opinion. The Iranians are only slightly less popular than the Israelis.

The thought patterns behind both the Israeli and Iranian courses of action elude me. Did the Iranians really think they could supply and support Hezbollah and Hamas in their attacks against Israel without Israel attacking them? Did the Israelis really think the Iranians would not react to the Israeli attack on their consulate in Syria? I suspect that the irony of their responding to an attack on a diplomatic office with a massive retaliation is lost on them.

Did the Israelis really think the Iranians would not respond to the attack on its Syrian office and the deaths of several high-ranking officers? What are both sides thinking now?

And what would the effect of an attack like Iran’s against Israel be on American military bases and cities? Would we fare as well as the Israelis have?

Update

The estimates of the costs of Israel’s defense last night are around $1-$1.3 billion while the cost of Iran’s attack are estimated at a fraction of that. Should Israel counter-attack, I suspect that tells us something about the nature of that counter-attack.

On the positive side it will be a lot easier for the Biden Administration to justify giving Israel defensive weapons to aid in its missile defense that offensive weapons to use against Hamas.

Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance has an op-ed today in the New York Times. Here’s its opening:

President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.

Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.

Although I materially agree with what he says in the piece, I draw a different conclusion from the uncomfortable facts he presents than he does. I think that we should continue to provide aid to Ukraine to prevent an outright Russian victory and I think that President Biden should speak frankly and publicly. He should urge Ukraine’s government to accept goals short of the return to pre-2014 borders.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the reality of the situation. There is no amount of aid we’re actually capable of providing which will enable Ukraine to achieve its maximalist goals.

This morning shortly after rising I checked my blog as I always do and found to my dismay that The Glittering Eye was inaccessible. I scrambled around for a while checking my various hosting providers and trying to submit support requests. As an aside one of the effects of chatbots is that it has become extremely difficult if not impossible to get technical support.

I had a number of meetings scheduled this morning, starting at 8:00am and running back to back until just a few minutes ago. Once my rash of meetings had ended I performed a tracert. Somewhat to my surprise it succeeded. Buoyed by that success I pinged the site (earlier pings had failed). That worked, too. I signed back in and checked things out.

Now I’ve got to go back and cancel my support requests.

I wonder how many people in April 1993 realized how greatly the Internet would facilitate the distribution of propaganda? I certainly didn’t and I’ve been using it almost since then. Now we are positively deluged with information from every source imaginable. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low and an enormous amount of it is propaganda of one form or another.

For example, how many people have the IDF killed in Gaza? If you answer 30,000, you are repeating what is materially Hamas propaganda. Is it true or false? We have no idea. We also have no idea how many of those killed were civilians and how many Hamas fighters (also civilians but let’s not mince words).

Here’s another example. Practically everything you know or think you know about what’s going on in the war in Ukraine is somebody’s propaganda. Russian, Ukrainian, U. S., British. There’s very little we can really rely on other than that Russia invaded Ukraine and a lot of people on both sides have been killed.

How propagandized information has become (or maybe always has been) is what caught my attention in this passage from Lee Fang’s piece on pro-Ukraine propaganda at RealClearInvestigations:

American influence in Ukraine’s media environment stretches back to the end of the Cold War, though it has intensified in recent years. Since the outbreak of the war, USAID support has extended to 175 national Ukrainian media entities.

Over the last decade, efforts to crack down on speech have been increasingly justified as an effort to protect social media from disinformation. The U.S. helped set up new think tanks and media watchdogs and brought over communications specialists to guide Ukraine’s approach. Nina Jankowicz, the polarizing official whom President Biden appointed to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board to police social media content, previously advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on its anti-disinformation work.

In response to questions about the U.S.-backed anti-disinformation groups in Ukraine targeting Americans, the U.S. State Department provided a statement saying it defines disinformation as “as false or misleading information that is deliberately created or spread with the intent to deceive or mislead.” It added, “We accept there may be other interpretations or definitions and do not censor or coerce independent organizations into adopting our definition.”

but

Last September, journalist Jack Poulson reported on a leaked report from the Zinc Network’s Open Information Partnership, which helps coordinate the activities of several anti-Russian disinformation nonprofits around Europe backed by NATO members, including Detector Media.

The lengthy report defines disinformation as not only false or misleading content but also “verifiable information which is unbalanced or skewed, amplifies, or exaggerates certain elements for effect, or uses emotive or inflammatory language to achieve effects which fit within existing Kremlin narratives, aims, or activities.”

In other words, factual information with emotional language that simply overlaps with anything remotely connected to Russian viewpoints is considered disinformation, according to this U.S.-backed consulting firm helping to guide the efforts of Ukrainian think tanks and media.

The emphasis is mine. That definition of disinformation is in direct conflict with the State Department’s (quoted above). Or, in other words, organizations whose mission is to identify and counter disinformation are themselves spreading disinformation. Talk about a wilderness of mirrors.

What then is a person to believe? My general strategy is to view just about everything skeptically but especially statements that are contradicted by the actions of people making them and to place special credence on declarations against interest.