#exprimis

The author's bio is a treat:

Charles S. Faddis served for 20 years as an operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, including as a department chief at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and as a chief of station in the Middle East. He earned his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. from the University of Maryland Law School. He is the author of several books, including Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security and Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

I wonder what he identifies as the failures of the CIA? Let's see:

The CIA had no sources inside Al Qaeda to tell us about the 9/11 plot.

The CIA didn't immediately attribute COVID-19, known to be descended from bat-borne coronaviruses, to the bat coronavirus gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab.

Bureaucracy and a risk-averse culture.

Loss of skills, but also loss of mystique: "The people who run our government [...] have done their best to turn the CIA into just another federal agency. [...] We act as if anyone can be taught to conduct espionage—as if this is no longer an arcane craft to be practiced by a select group of unique people."

"The CIA has proved unable to put a source inside a Chinese bio lab, within the leadership structure of the Taliban, or next to Vladimir Putin."

The CIA has been politicized: backing Hillary Clinton in the Benghazi inquiries, aiding the Trump dossier investigation, and former intelligence officers decrying the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian propaganda.

The first point is transparently false; read the 9/11 Report and you will learn that the CIA had "real-time intelligence" on Bin Laden as early as 1996, with a plan to capture the known terrorist financier in place by the fall of 1997. That Bin Laden was planning to hijack civilian airliners was known as early as 1998.

The second point is still a matter of contention.

The third point is true of every part of government, but is especially true in international politics, geez.

The fourth point makes Charles Faddis sound like he's been reading too many spy novels where there's no risk of war from getting found out.

The fifth point is false as to Al Qaeda and laughable as to Putin. And if the CIA had any assets in Wuhan, their existence would be so totally classified that the CIA would hesitate to use their information in public, because the CIA prefers to not have its spies tortured and executed.

The sixth point reads like the seething cope of a man whose ideology is opposed by the Deep State, whether or not his facts are right. It is incredibly ironic that he complains that the CIA, which historically reported only to the President, was a political tool of the presidential administration of a Democrat.

So what does he identify as solutions?

Fire a lot of people.

"Recruiting must be completely revamped. Quotas are absurd. Focusing on color, gender, and sexual orientation is at best irrelevant. We want the best, and that means those people who possess the unique blend of skills and abilities that enable them to do what everyone else considers impossible."

Make training tougher.

Flatten the org chart and make it all about ops, not about analysis or support.

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The gender ideology behind these lies is a sibling of critical race theory. While critical race activists are teaching kids that they are largely define by their skin color, gender activists are teaching kids that there are a great many genders, and that only they know their true gender.

I'm not sure if Shrier was listening to what she was saying. In what ways are "this is a feature of yourself which everyone can see and you can't change or escape" and "this is a feature of yourself which only you know the truth of, and which you can change" at all similar ideologies? How are they siblings?

The only similarity that Shrier identifies in this essay/speech is the fact that they're pushed by the same general set of people, and objections to these ideologies are lazily tarred as -phobic bigotry. Is that enough to say that they're sibling ideologies? Or is Shrier jumping on the latest bandwagon to gain some brownie points?

Scott Atlas is a name you may have heard of from American coronavirus-related news. He has credentials in medicine, and served as a medical advisor to many presidential campaigns and one president.

The question in the title of the issue, "Science, Politics, and COVID: Will Truth Prevail?" is primarily a result of the rapidly-evolving state of the science on coronavirus transmission; this speech was on February 18, 2021. This issue was already agéd when it was printed and when it was shipped; it arrived in my mailbox in April. But many of Atlas' sources seem to be dated themselves; this feels like a speech that was written in May or June of 2020.

Excuses must be made for his frequent failure to city his sources, for Imprimis articles are adapted from speeches, and it is hard to insert footnotes in speeches. His sources are Notable Person This and Politicized Government Agency That, not DOI numbers.

Atlas' key concerns are three:

The government did a bunch of totalitarian things when it closed schools/churches/venues/stores and when it made mask mandates.

The American people, who should be freedom-loving, acquiesced to this tyranny. He does not investigate why they acquiesced.

He's been the target of professional pushback ("cancel culture") for both working with the Trump White House and for the public-policy advice he gave to the Trump White House about the response to the coronavirus pandemic. And so have people who have said the things he says.

The first two items are the items that this issue of Imprimis opens with.

The second item is not addressed; he does not investigate why the American people generally acquiesced to government measures to control the pandemic. I'm curious what he would say.

The first item, about the totalitarianism of the government and its negative effects, is interesting. He talks about all the bad things that happened and continue to happen for as long as lockdowns are in place. To make an analogy about diverting traffic, he's very upset that the government diverted traffic onto the current route, and wishes that they would remove the diversion. He doesn't address what will happen when the diversion is removed, or what benefit came from diverting traffic.

The third item, on the pushback he has received from academia and from Twitter, is where he writes the most words. The subjects of his cancellation are two:

He encourages re-opening businesses, churches, and particularly schools. His primary concern appears to be reopening schools, because he is concerned about developmental delays and lost education. He believes that children are less susceptible to the disease and less able to transmit the disease. This speech predates the CDC's decision to reopen schools and the subsequent COVID outbreaks that are centered in schools. Beyond referencing some old data about children's ability to get sick and transmit the virus, he does not consider children as disease vectors through the surrounding community.

He holds a nuanced opinion on masking; he is not opposed to masks. His views are "Wear a mask when you cannot socially distance," and he cites WHO guidance, focusing on their one-meter social distancing advice for when it's safe to not wear a mask. He does not recite the other factors of WHO's guidance on when to wear masks, or WHO's "crowded, closed, close-contact" guidance of when to wear a mask, or WHO guidance that it's safer to just wear a mask if you're not sure about the ventilation in an area. He leaves a lot of room for people to say, "Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford said I don't need to wear a mask."

Nuance is often praised, but I think he dangerously misleads the audience and the reader is when he says that experts and studies don't back the efficacy of masking. Atlas is a man of medicine, yet I wonder if he actually reads the journals. He cites many notable figures and some studies, but he appears to be utterly ignorant of any science regarding masks that came out since May 2020's "we haven't yet positively proven that masks are effective" studies. The Lancet published a meta-analysis in June 2020 of studies covering SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 transmission with masks, which concluded that masks were helpful in reducing transmission. Scott Atlas' ignorance may be innocent, but given the level of pushback he says he got from other medical professionals, I can't help but think his ignorance is willful.

And that ignorance is willful, why?

Atlas has some good concerns — Big Tech is censorious, science has been politicized for years — but he's reached this correct conclusion only because he's wrong.

Having identified those two problems, his speech and essay end. He doesn't propose solutions to censorious Big Tech or politicized science. He's pointed out the problem.

Well, that's being unnecessarily hard on him. He's new to these phenomena; he's not familiar with Big Tech's history of censorship and his field wasn't previously politicized in a way he cared about.

It's okay for him not to have solutions to these complex problems which are in fields that he doesn't practice. Identifying a problem is the first step towards fixing it, after all.

Yet I'm disappointed by this edition of Imprimis. Where he's right, Scott Atlas is saying nothing new. Where he's wrong, he misleads people about the established science. I hope that Hillsdale College will find a better speaker and essayist in the next issue.

Not much of note in this one. It's just a shallow review of how Christmas as celebrated in the US has evolved since the British times, with reminders that it's about Christ, not Saturnalia. Then it segues into New Year, with an extended yet uncritical recounting of Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

This July 220, 2021 speech by Mark Morgan (former acting commissioner, 2019-2021, US Customs and Border Protection, the guy in charge) has about three redeeming points:

It identifies physical barriers are somewhat more reliable than non-physical barriers to passage

It connects a decrease in cruelty in the asylum system to an increase in the number of women, children, and whole families attempting to immigrate to the US from Central America and the world

It criticizes immigration policy for being set by the courts and by the executive, instead of by Congress.

The rest of it is a laundry list of "Biden is preventing ICE and CBP from doing their jobs, which is why there are more people applying for asylum, more border-crossers being caught, and more asylum applicants being settled." I think Mark Morgan believes that the role of ICE and CBP is to just unilaterally reject people who apply to enter the country, no matter who they are or what their circumstances are, or where they're applying from.

He disses the Biden administration's idea of "root cause analysis", instead pinning the root cause of increased documented and undocumented immigration and asylum cases as the US being more willing to let people in without first exposing them to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. He dismisses any discussion of changing situations in lands south of the Rio Grande, and does not appear to consider that changes in US foreign or domestic policy could alleviate the immigration pressure.

Mark Steyn leads us on a Gish Gallop in the April/May 2021 issue of Imprimis. This rambling speech touches on many topics, some factually inaccurate, which the author seems bothered by theirr modern-day occurrence.

Things which I am amused that Mark Steyn does not mention:

The Internet, a marvelous mechanism whereby people can communicate to the public without having to go through the press's filter.

Social atomization and alienation of labor

Secularism

And then here's the things which I think he did get right, in which his future shock is valid:

Pandemic precautions - understandable; he wasn't alive in 1918, and even in 1918 we didn't understand disease spread.

"Transgender fanaticism" - to be fair to the author, public acknowledgement of trans people at the modern scale, and protection of their rights, is unprecedented.

Climate change, and the need to take action now to prevent harms a century from now

The long list of everything he says is unprecedented or unrecognizable will be mocked after the break: