History, Security

Bastiat Economics and Microsoft’s Broken Windows

Leave a comment

1907 the “Asiatic Exclusion League” chanting “Keep Canada White” demolished downtown Vancouver and stormed City Hall, foreshadowing 1938 Kristallnacht in Germany. Source: Vancouver is Awesome

Microsoft is now out to prove that Bastiat’s 1850 broken window fallacy (Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas) is actually a great way to make money! (In other words, profit from waging expensively self-destructive cyber wars.)

What do I mean by profit from broken windows?

In a real-life example, scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki has often claimed that a corporation polluting a river adds to a country’s GDP. If the river has become polluted, an expensive program will be required to clean it up. Residents may choose to buy more expensive bottled water rather than cheaper tap water.

Suzuki points to this new economic activity, which will raise GDP, and claim that the GDP has risen overall in the community, although the quality of life has decreased.

Suzuki, however, forgot to take into account all the decreases in GDP that will be caused by the water pollution precisely because the economic losers are more difficult to identify than the economic winners. We don’t know what the government or the taxpayers would have done with the money had they not needed to clean up the river. We know from the Broken Window Fallacy that there will be an overall decline in GDP, not a rise.

That’s right. An 1850 economic theory predicted attempts by Microsoft to fraudulently make money with broken WINDOWS.

In the early 1990s Bill Gates infamously told his lead engineers and architects he would leave security out of the first release of Windows NT 3.5 (and I remember it well!) because safety slowed down their release schedules.

In the late 1990s Bill Gates also infamously told the SCO (Santa Cruz Operations) security teams (and I again remember well, hearing it directly from them!) that he had no interest in adding security to Windows after the fact because it wouldn’t make him a billion dollars.

Microsoft was willfully pumping out known defective windows expected to break.

This was confessed in 2001 with incredibly tone deaf articles like “Gates pushed change in security culture at Microsoft“.

Yeah he pushed NO SECURITY long and hard because he demanded broken Windows would bring him higher margins.

Speaking of long and hard, when I was in college my economics professor described to his students the Gates family way of thinking in terms of Soviet corruption (and this is allegedly a true story, as he was an expert in Soviet apocryphal economics):

When window production success was measured on tonnage generated, the windows came out so hard/thick none would fit in any buildings. So when window production success was shifted to measure square meters generated, the windows came out so long/thin none ever made to to the buildings without breaking.

Since the inputs didn’t change, and corruption allowed the factory operators to be lauded based on simplistic metrics, they gamed the system for selfish profit and screwed everyone else.

What was Microsoft Windows really measured on? It wasn’t security (preventing breaches), that’s for sure, and so decades of broken Windows have flowed and flowed and flowed into buildings around the world (especially America) being breached over and over and over again.

The SolarWinds disaster is like a ridiculously obvious return to Soviet-era economic lessons (if not 1850s early industrialization) for very basic supply-chain safety.

Microsoft (MSFT) is officially a cybersecurity giant. For the first time on Tuesday, Microsoft disclosed revenue from its various security offerings as part of its quarterly earnings — $10 billion over the last 12 months.

That amounts to a 40% year-over-year jump in the growing security business, making up roughly 7% of the company’s total revenue for the previous year.

“We waited in some sense [until] this milestone to show the depth, the breadth, the span of what we are doing,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Yahoo Finance… [following] Microsoft’s involvement in uncovering the breadth of the massive SolarWinds cyber attack in December, which hit private companies like cybersecurity firm FireEye (FEYE) and government agencies including the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments, as well as the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s very sad and so very unfortunate how Microsoft pushed out Windows that break and now is so shamelessly pleased to announce it’s making all its money repairing them. Why aren’t the Window repairs paid directly out of Gates’ fortunes?

In reality the cost of repairing Windows is dragging the economy down, while Gates gets richer.

Deploying broken Windows in the first place is a shameless tax on companies, which all would be far better off buying safe systems and then spending “fix tax” money elsewhere because it’s not needed (broken window fallacy as Bastiat warned us so long ago).

Related: a Harvard thesis in the mid-1990s (same time Gates was pushing out broken windows) argued apartheid can be very profitable (for fascists who stand to profit from those forced to live in fear with broken windows)

Kobach wrote about a white police state as good for business. He seemed to think beating down non-white populations (those seeking equal rights with white police) was how to push wealth into white hands just as a matter of “peace keeping”.

Now go back to the start of this post and tell me if you can see the “where do you want to go today” slogan (perhaps a longer version of “get out”) in that image from 1907 rioting white supremacists in Canada, breaking all the windows…

Energy, History, Sailing, Security

The Future-Future of Aircraft Carriers

Leave a comment

The impressively huge Aircraft Carrier was a decisive platform in past wars and still gets a lot of airtime (pun not intended).

…when word of a crisis breaks out in Washington, it’s no accident that the first question that comes to everyone’s lips is: ‘where’s the nearest carrier?’

However, I can’t help but think about it in terms of a commoditization line over history.

What I mean to say is that there is a line that goes from the 1960s drone war being conducted on a mainframe in a few high-security buildings, all the way to warfare today being done using mobile phones in everyone’s pocket.

Take the core concept of the “carrier”. In today’s commodity technology terms I believe you get an autonomous sea box of tiny drones ready to swarm.

Source: Louisiana-based shipbuilder Metal Shark, selected to develop and implement the Long Range Unmanned Surface Vessel (LRUSV) System for the United States Marine Corps

One of the lessons of the 1980 failed operation Eagle Claw, for example, was they came up one single aircraft short of a complete mission.

Imagine telling that story instead where the numbers of aircraft launched from sea are no hurdle at all — opposite problem really, as you have surplus of highly operational units.

The sea launch platform already was pioneered a while ago by submarines launching drones out of their missile tubes. And the Navy many years ago was manually launching swarms of 50 drones. Surely by now they’ve combined these two advances into tubes at sea having a magazine attached.

Now flatten the carrier to waterline (e.g. into a Low Visibility Craft or LVC) to remove its target profile, and with a towline attach a submarine filled with sensors and tubes of hundreds or thousands or drones.

It would look like a fatter version of the 2016 Wave Glider submersible by Liquid Robotics.

Obviously this means surface vessels could easily reload by picking up another tow-line submersible, bringing resupply buoys (forward docking stations) into the picture on “long line” deployments.

Also I can’t help but mention this is very similar to what was being designed in the late 1800s and even demonstrated by Tesla himself, so we’re on a very late cycle of adoption (postponed by WWI emphasis on maintaining control over petroleum distribution).

The drones could launch undersea or on surface. Either way it’s a far more modern take on an old solution, for an even older problem in warfare.

Security

This Day in History 1968: Vietnam Tet Offensive and Nixon’s Treason

Leave a comment
U.S. Embassy in Saigon, January 1968. Source: Consortium News

On the day of Tết (Vietnamese New Year) I encourage the reader to think about a 1968 Viet Cong breach of the US Embassy and how it relates to a violent 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection:

En route to the American Embassy, the sappers were spotted driving without lights by a South Vietnamese civilian policeman. This member of the South Vietnamese National Police force, referred to as the white mice, chose to avoid problems and stepped back into the shadows as the truck and taxi passed by. The sappers had similar good fortune confronting the embassy’s first line of defense. After turning onto Thong Nhut Boulevard, they encountered four police officers, but the policemen fled without firing a shot.

This day in 1968 had a profound impact on American sentiment and consequences of the Vietnam War, due to reporting like this.

It abruptly became abundantly clear to Americans sitting at home that things were not going well for their government.

In other words sentiment shifted to ending US operations and talk about a withdrawal. We need to remember how a breach of the US Embassy had an outsized role in that shift.

The policemen did not stop the insurrectionists.

The US government building was breached.

Now hold those two thoughts.

Historians have since revealed also in 1968 (given the shifting sentiment during a Presidential campaign year) the GOP intentionally destroyed chances of peace, killing tens of thousands of Americans needlessly, just to get themselves into office:

…the Paris Peace talks, intended to put an end to the 13-year-long Vietnam War, failed because an aide working for then-Presidential candidate Richard Nixon convinced the South Vietnamese to walk away from the dealings.

The GOP Presidential candidate blew up peace talks of the US intentionally to make more Americans suffer and in pain elect him president on a false promise he would fix the mess he created (a lie quickly revealed as he instead expanded the war and increased deaths 10s of thousands more).

Here’s a more detailed account:

…Chennault — the China-born widow of World War II hero Gen. Claire Chennault of the famed Flying Tigers and a major Nixon fund-raiser — passed word to South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu that if he boycotted planned peace talks in Paris, he could count on the support of a President Nixon. The Nixon campaign feared that Thieu’s presence would result in a deal that would end the war and swing the election to Humphrey. President Lyndon Johnson had ordered a halt in the bombing of Hanoi, also raising those hopes. But when Thieu indeed stayed away, the talks collapsed and Nixon was elected by 0.7 percent of the vote.

It gets even worse:

Nixon, in getting away with the Chennault caper, may have convinced himself he could do so again in Watergate. “If only we had known,” Mr. Hughes wrote. “Nixon wasn’t a rogue with a redemptive streak of patriotism. He played politics with peace to win the 1968 election. He did the same to win re-election in 1972 at the cost of thousands of American lives.” The tragedies that marked 1968 were horrible enough, without evidence that the winner of its presidential election did so by engaging in an illegal and despicable scheme to sabotage a sitting president’s efforts to end the Vietnam War.

Nixon was breaking the law, not to mention acting obviously immorally.

President Johnson himself privately called Nixon treasonous yet never publicly dropped this word because he underestimated the GOP threat to democracy.

After Johnson privately deemed Nixon’s actions as treasonous, an extraordinary call occurred between Johnson and Nixon, in which Nixon did enough to satisfy the President’s concerns to prevent Johnson from going public about the Chennault actions. 
Johnson had hoped that, to the extent possible, Vietnam would not be an issue in the fall campaign, and that the three candidates (Nixon, Humphrey, and George Wallace) would not interfere with his attempts to achieve a peace settlement before he left office.

Nixon was predictably turning the GOP into exactly what Truman in 1952 publicly blasted Eisenhower for allowing (with Nixon as VP candidate) — the same kind of party behavior (fascism) that the US had just fought WWII to remove from power.

The Republican candidate [Eisenhower] for the Presidency cannot escape responsibility for his endorsements. He has had an attack of moral blindness, for today, he is willing to accept the very practices that identified the so-called ‘master-race’ although he took a leading part in liberating Europe from their domination. I do not withdraw a word of that statement. […] …Senator Nixon [candidate for Vice President] and most Republicans, voted to override any veto of the McCarran bill, which is recognized everywhere as discriminatory.

Eisenhower was too soft on Nixon. LBJ was too soft on Nixon.

Nixon let tens of thousands of Americans die and delayed their safety so that he could take control of government.

And just for reference, Ronald Reagan would repeat this strategy for the GOP in 1980 when he delayed the safety of hostages in Iran in order to take control of government.

I am not trying here to minimize the impact of the 1968 military “Tet Offensive” (or all the warnings that it was coming) as hugely impactful to American sentiment and strategy in the Vietnam War.

Here’s a fine example of what that narrative looks like from the Army War College:

In contrast to the Viet Cong’s previous strategies of raiding, the Viet Cong occupied Huế and captured thousands of civilians and prisoners of war. Bullington was serving as a Foreign Service Officer at the time, and found himself in Hue in unusual circumstances. In this podcast, Bullington tells both his personal story (a love story in the midst of a war) and about the broader implications of the battle. While historians still debate the impact of the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Hue on the conduct of the American War in Vietnam, this story reminds us of the personal narratives and consequences that are also central to war.

Here’s another first-person narrative: “…the longer we stayed in Vietnam the more Viet Cong there were because we created them, we produced them…”

I am trying to draw attention to the fact that a US Embassy breach, and its reporting, should not be lost on anyone looking for insights from history.

If only more Americans could have understood how their personal narratives and consequences were being shaped by the domestic variant of fascism after 1948 — anti-democratic forces infiltrating and taking control of the GOP… now it’s just history.

Or is it?

Last I heard today’s GOP still are playing some of these games. Not to mention police didn’t stop the insurrectionists attacking an American government building on January 6, 2021…

53 years after a January violent offensive overran US government facilities, and a GOP ruthlessly and intentionally lied to undermine democracy, current news basically has us still talking about the same things.

Even more detail here:

History, Security

New Data Proves Reagan Scuttled Iran Embassy Hostage Release — Harmed America to Win Election

Leave a comment

An interesting new set of evidence shows an old controversial theory is turning out to be true: Ronald Reagan worked covertly to block American attempts to free their hostages in Iran, as a means to win the Presidency.

A Jacobin magazine article writes up the core issue:

[We don’t have a smoking gun for] Reagan striking a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election, but simply working behind the scenes to thwart negotiations to free them.

Jacobin pulled that analysis from the following paragraphs in a hugely important NYT disclosure, generated from fresh “records of Project Eagle donated to Yale” that were unsealed upon Rockefeller’s recent death.

Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.

The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.

“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.

That all should have been the introductory context setting for another new article in The Drive that gives an incredibly detailed look at Operation Eagle Claw.

Any judgment of Eagle Claw must be rendered within this context. Political partisanship aside, any fair, objective appraisal of the mission must also acknowledge that not only did President Carter’s strategy deliver the desired results in the end, that strategy was, in the words of Pollack, “the only one that could have worked [emphasis original].” Unfortunately, it took 444 grueling, stressful days to reach the desired conclusion.

The Drive fails to consider at all (in its “non-partisan” effort) whether Reagan’s “smooth, smooth, smooth” elite team of high-powered officials were effective at extending the grueling, stressful days. That seems essential to the story.

More importantly the Drive gushes with positive portrayals of Carter as a great leader, highly respected in the military, yet no harsh assessment of Reagan’s efforts to intentionally harm America and increase suffering of America’s high-profile hostages… harms done just to drive a great leader like Carter out and push himself and GOP into the White House.