Hannity: 'I believe in the science of vaccination'
https://twitter.com/i/status/1417300107960094720
“The Mechanisms of Cult Production” compares the behavior of political elites across a wide range of dictatorial regimes, from Caligula’s Rome to the Kim family’s North Korea, and finds striking similarities. Despite vast differences in culture and material circumstances, elites in all such regimes engage in pretty much the same behavior, especially what the paper dubs “loyalty signaling” and “flattery inflation.”
Signaling is a concept originally drawn from economics; it says that people sometimes engage in costly, seemingly pointless behavior as a way to prove that they have attributes others value. For example, new hires at investment banks may work insanely long hours, not because the extra hours are actually productive, but to demonstrate their commitment to feeding the money machine.
In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?
And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”: The Leader isn’t just brave and wise, he’s a perfect physical specimen, a brilliant health expert, a Nobel-level economic analyst, and more. The fact that he’s obviously none of these things only enhances the effectiveness of the flattery as a demonstration of loyalty.
Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.
Many people, myself included, have declared for years that the G.O.P. is no longer a normal political party. It doesn’t look anything like, say, Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party or Germany’s Christian Democrats. But it bears a growing resemblance to the ruling parties of autocratic regimes.
The only unusual thing about the G.O.P.’s wholesale adoption of the Leader Principle is that the party doesn’t have a monopoly on power; ....Unfortunately, all this loyalty signaling is putting the whole nation at risk. In fact, it will almost surely kill large numbers of Americans in the next few months.But politics is nonetheless clearly a key factor: Republican politicians and Republican-oriented influencers have driven much of the opposition to Covid-19 vaccines, in some cases engaging in what amounts to outright sabotage. And there is a stunning negative correlation between Trump’s share of a county’s vote in 2020 and its current vaccination rate.That is, hostility to vaccines has become a form of loyalty signaling.
The Pegasus Project, an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations in 10 countries, was coordinated by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and advised by Amnesty International. Those two groups had access to a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that included surveillance targets for clients of the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which they shared with the journalists. Over the past several months, the journalists reviewed and analyzed the list in an effort to learn the identities of the owners of the phone numbers and to determine whether their phones had been implanted with NSO’s Pegasus spyware.
The investigation was able to link more than 1,000 government officials, journalists, businesspeople and human rights activists to numbers and to obtain data for 67 phones whose numbers appeared on the list. That data was then analyzed forensically by Amnesty International’s Security Lab. Thirty-seven of those showed evidence of an attempted Pegasus intrusion or a successful hack.Further analysis indicated that many of those intrusions or attempted intrusions came shortly after the phone number had been entered onto the list — some within seconds — suggesting a link between the list and subsequent surveillance efforts.The most sophisticated spyware is generally deployed by law enforcement or intelligence agencies, and there is a robust private market to provide those tools to nations that can afford them, including the United States. It has long been suspected that terrorist groups and sophisticated criminal gangs also have access to spyware. Spyware from another Israeli company, Candiru, was used to infect the computers and phones of activists, politicians and other victims through phony websites masquerading as pages for Black Lives Matter or health groups, cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab said this month.NSO has long said that Pegasus cannot be used to successfully target phones in the United States and that it should be used only against “suspected criminals and terrorists.” But research groups have found that it’s also been used to spy on political figures, journalists and human rights workers — findings confirmed by the Pegasus Project investigation.There is little meaningful legal protection against being targeted by spyware in most of the world. NSO says Pegasus cannot be used on numbers inside the United States, Israel’s most important ally. The United States has some legal restrictions on spyware, including the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was enacted in 1986 and bans “unauthorized access” of a computer or phone, but its vague language has meant that it’s often unevenly applied in court. Some states have passed cybersecurity and privacy laws, such as California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, which bans electronic tampering or interference. WhatsApp has cited both laws in an ongoing court case against NSO.
In this Nov. 20, 2015 file photo, convicted spy Jonathan Pollard leaves a federal courthouse in New York. Pollard, an American who served a 30-year sentence for spying for Israel, defended his actions in his first interview since arriving in Israel to a hero's welcome in December 2020, saying America had “stabbed Israel in the back” by withholding intelligence from its ally. In excerpts from the interview with the Israel Hayom daily published on Monday, March 22, 2021, Pollard describes his happiness at being a free man in Israel.Jonathan Pollard, an American who served a 30-year sentence for spying for Israel, defends his actions in his first interview since arriving in Israel late last year. He says America had “stabbed Israel in the back” by withholding intelligence from its ally.
In excerpts from the interview with the Israel Hayom daily published Monday, Pollard describes his happiness at being a free man in Israel while expressing regret that he was not able to father children because of his incarceration.
Pollard, now 66, sold military secrets to Israel while working as a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy in the 1980s. He was arrested in 1985 after trying unsuccessfully to gain asylum at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and pleaded guilty. The espionage affair embarrassed Israel and tarnished its relations with the United States for years.
Pollard was given a life sentence. U.S. defense and intelligence officials said his spying caused great damage and strenuously argued against his release. But after serving 30 years in federal prison, he was released in 2015 and placed on a five-year parole period. Pollard arrived in Israel to a hero’s welcome in December.
He told Israel Hayom that at the time of his spying the U.S. government was keeping intelligence from Israel and lying to it, claiming he witnessed it himself at meetings.
“I know I crossed a line, but I had no choice,” he told the newspaper, adding that the threats to Israel were “serious.”
The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.
The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.
Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols.
The latest round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians ended in the usual way: with a cease-fire that left Palestinians worse off and the core issues unaddressed. It also provided more evidence that the United States should no longer give Israel unconditional economic, military, and diplomatic support. The benefits of this policy are zero, and the costs are high and rising. Instead of a special relationship, the United States and Israel need a normal one.
Once upon a time, a special relationship between the United States and Israel might have been justified on moral grounds. The creation of a Jewish state was seen as an appropriate response to centuries of violent antisemitism in the Christian West, including but hardly limited to the Holocaust. The moral case was compelling, however, only if one ignored the consequences for Arabs who had lived in Palestine for many centuries and if one believed Israel to be a country that shared basic U.S. values. Here too the picture was complicated. Israel may have been “the only democracy in the Middle East,” but it was not a liberal democracy like the United States, where all religions and races are supposed to have equal rights (however imperfectly that goal has been realized). Consistent with Zionism’s core objectives, Israel privileged Jews over others by conscious design.
Just 7% of our genome is uniquely shared with other humans, and not shared by other early ancestors, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
“That’s a pretty small percentage,” said Nathan Schaefer, a University of California computational biologist and co-author of the new paper. “This kind of finding is why scientists are turning away from thinking that we humans are so vastly different from Neanderthals.”
The research draws upon DNA extracted from fossil remains of now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans dating back to around 40,000 or 50,000 years ago, as well as from 279 modern people from around the world.
Scientists already know that modern people share some DNA with Neanderthals, but different people share different parts of the genome. One goal of the new research was to identify the genes that are exclusive to modern humans.
It’s a difficult statistical problem, and the researchers “developed a valuable tool that takes account of missing data in the ancient genomes,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the research.
The researchers also found that an even smaller fraction of our genome — just 1.5% — is both unique to our species and shared among all people alive today. Those slivers of DNA may hold the most significant clues as to what truly distinguishes modern human beings.
“We can tell those regions of the genome are highly enriched for genes that have to do with neural development and brain function,” said University of California, Santa Cruz computational biologist Richard Green, a co-author of the paper.
In 2010, Green helped produce the first draft sequence of a Neanderthal genome. Four years later, geneticist Joshua Akey co-authored a paper showing that modern humans carry some remnants of Neanderthal DNA. Since then, scientists have continued to refine techniques to extract and analyze genetic material from fossils.
“The average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”
Most experts and chimpanzees < most simple algorithms < most modestly more complicated algorithms (improper linear models) < significantly more complicated algorithms (linear regression models) < most machine learning algorithms (AI models based on huge data sets that contain hidden broken legs)
“One review of intuition in managerial decision making defines it as ‘a judgment for a given course of action that comes to mind with an aura or conviction of rightness or plausibility, but without clearly articulated reasons or justifications -- essentially knowing but without knowing why.’ .... Confidence is not guarantee of accuracy, however, and many confident predictions turn out to be wrong. While both bias and noise contribute to prediction errors, the largest source of such errors is not the limit on how good predictive judgments are. It is the limit on how good they could be. This limit, which we call objective ignorance, is the focus of this chapter. .... In general, however, you can safely expect that people who engage in predictive tasks will underestimate their objective ignorance. Overconfidence is one of the best documented cognitive biases. .... wherever there is prediction, there is ignorance and more of it than you think.”
“More broadly, our understanding the world depends on our extraordinary ability to construct narratives that explain the events we observe. The search for causes is almost always successful because causes can be drawn from an unlimited reservoir of facts and beliefs about the world [we unconsciously apply hindsight to explain the inexplicable]. .... Genuine surprise occurs only when routine hindsight fails. This continuous interpretation of reality as it unfolds consists of the steady flow of hindsight in the valley of the normal. As we know from classic research on hindsight, even when subjective uncertainty does exist for a while, memories of it are largely erased when the uncertainty is resolved.”
“Relying on causal thinking about a single case is a source of predictable errors. Taking the statistical view, which we will also call the outside view,[4] is a way to avoid these errors. .... The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding the world. However, causal thinking and the illusion of understanding the past contribute to overconfident predictions off the future. .... the preference for causal thinking also contributes to the neglect of noise as a source of error, because noise is a fundamentally statistical notion.”
In September, I wrote that the United States faced a situation akin to the 1933 burning of Weimar Germany’s parliament, which Hitler used to seize power.
“America, this is our Reichstag moment,” the column said, citing the eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder on the lessons of 20th-century authoritarianism. Snyder argued that President Donald Trump had “an authoritarian’s instinct” and was surrounding the election in “the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat.” Predicted Snyder: “It’s going to be messy.”
Trump enablers such as Sen. Lindsey Graham scoffed. “With all due respect to @Milbank, he’s in the bat$hit crazy phase of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the South Carolina Republican tweeted, with a link to my column.But now we know that 1933 was very much on the mind of the nation’s top soldier, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides of Trump’s “stomach-churning” lies about election fraud. “The gospel of the Führer,” Milley labeled Trump’s claims.
Milley, as reported in a forthcoming book by The Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, feared that people around Trump were seeking to “overturn the government,” saw that pro-Trump protesters would serve as “brownshirts in the streets” — and was determined that “the Nazis aren’t getting in” to block Joe Biden’s inauguration.American democracy survived that coup attempt on Jan. 6. But the danger has not subsided. I called Snyder, who accurately predicted the insurrection, to ask how the history of European authoritarianism informs our current state.
“We’re looking almost certainly at an attempt in 2024 to take power without winning election,” he told me Thursday. Recent moves in Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress the votes of people of color and to give the legislatures control over casting electoral votes “are all working toward the scenario in 2024 where they lose by 10 million votes but they still appoint their guy.”
History also warns of greater violence. “If people are excluded from voting rights, then naturally they’re going to start to think about other options, on the one side,” Snyder said. “But, on the other side, the people who are benefiting because their vote counts for more think of themselves as entitled — and when things don’t go their way, they’re also more likely to be violent.”The extinguishing of our Reichstag fire on Jan. 6 made Trump’s failed coup less like 1933 Germany than 1923 Germany, when Hitler’s clownish Beer Hall Putsch failed. Historically, most coup attempts fail. “But a failed coup is practice for a successful coup,” Snyder said. This is what’s ominous about the Republicans’ determination to sabotage investigations that could help us learn from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Also ominous is the move in many Republican-controlled states to ban schools from teaching about systemic racism — “memory laws,” Snyder calls them — which “feeds into this authoritarian turn” by providing cover for the new attempts to disenfranchise more non-White voters. “They’re trying to ban the discussion of things like voter suppression, and it’s precisely the history of voter suppression which allows us to see it for what it is,” Snyder said.
