USPS Postal Service Phishing Text Scam

A sophisticated professional computer programmer I know recently found himself victimized by a phishing scheme targeted at USPS (US Postal Service) customers.

The text he got read:

[USPS Tracking]: Your shopping address does not match the zip code, we cannot deliver,please re-enter complete information  Https:/s.id/1ttSP.  

As it happened, he received the text a few minutes after having left the Post Office, where he had just given them his phone number.

He had gone to the Post Office because he had been away from his second home longer than the USPS was willing to hold his mail, so he needed to stop the Post Office from simply returning the mail. Reestablishing his address was particularly urgent because he was expecting an important delivery that would otherwise be returned to sender.

He immediately spotted the typos ("shopping" instead of "shipping," and the lack of a space after the second comma) and even mentioned them to his son as an example of increasing incompetence within the Post Office. 

But because he had such a strong and pressing need to prevent his expected shipment from being returned to sender, and since he had just given the Post Office his phone number, he clicked the link.

That took him to a page that looked exactly like a USPS page, and even provided a tracking number.:

He provided the requested name and address information, and clicked "continue."  It then informed him that he needed to verify his identity by providing a credit card number, which the "Postal Service" would then run a $1 temporary charge through, as verification.  He entered a credit card number, including the special code on the back, but received a message saying that the card couldn't be processed, and inviting him to enter another one.  He did so, and that one was accepted.

It was only after he got home that it first occurred to him that he might have been phished.  He retraced his steps and saw that the name of the site that the link had taken him to was  https://susps.cc/#/, which seemed a bit suspicious.  He then looked at the phone number from which the text had come -- 914-531-3510.  A google search of that yielded 5 hits all of which seemed to associate the number with various unusual-sounding names, and 3 of which associated it with the village of Mount Kisco, New York.  Not the Post Office, in any event.  

He immediately cancelled the credit cards and presumably has emerged from the episode unscathed.  

My point in writing this up is that while it's easy for us to laugh at the typos in scam texts and assume that nobody would fall for them, each of us has moments when we let our guard down, and if the text comes in at one of those moments, even the sharpest among us can become victims.  

Assuming that the scammers sent out 10 million such texts, and had only a "success" rate of one in a thousand, that's still a thousand successes, and potentially two thousand stolen credit cards. As artificial intelligence and other technological developments makes scamming more sophisticated, the success rates and numbers of compromised careds will only go up.

Innovavisitpay.org scam

I had a hospital bill from Inova that I needed to pay, and I didn't remember my login so I just called the pay-by-phone option.  It told me I could pay online at "Inovavisitpay.org", but it didn't spell it for me.  I quickly typed in "Innovavisitpay.org" which looked like a hospital website and said something about putting patients first, and had a prominent link for Medical Billing Services.

It didn't look quite right to me so I checked the spelling and realized I had typed 2 n's instead of 1.  I typed it in correctly, got to the right site and was able to pay my bill.

Not sure exactly what would have happened if I had clicked on any of the options of the first site, but clearly it's some kind of scam, preying on people trying to reach inova's billing software.

I tried googling Innovavisitpay.org in quotes and got literally zero hits, so while there is a hospital in Texas that uses 2 n's, this isn't that.  Maybe future googlers will end up on this site.

In my comments about Inova's service, I encouraged them to try to shut down the scam site.  But they probably don't have much incentive to do so.  We'll see.

Len the Plumber Eighty Dollar Coupon Fake Google Reviews Intentional Delays Price Gouging Scam

If you're considering Len the Plumber for your plumbing needs, and/or if you'd rather not pay a thousand dollars to have them spend an hour fixing a clogged drain, read this.  If you get to the end, you'll agree with me that Len the Plumber needs a new motto:

Len the Plumber:  

WE WILL CHEAT YOU IF WE CAN

I'm a somewhat involuntary landlord, having found myself in possession of a condo that I didn't need but was not quite ready to sell.  So I'm learning how to be a landlord.

My tenant called a few days ago to let me know that the kitchen drain wasn't working and that he'd tried a plunger and Dran-o to no avail. I gave him some Liquid Plumr to try, but that didn't work either.  Then I went in with a friend, opened up some pipes, and used a manual snake to clear the drain.  We got a lot of gunk out, and the drain seemed to be working, but it quickly clogged up again.  And in putting the pipes back together, some small leaks appeared that we were unable to stop.  

So it was time to call a real plumber.

I live in Alexandria VA.  Someone had recommended All Seasons Plumbing to me, so I tried to Google them.  Here's what I got:

So I got a bunch of ads first, with the business I had been looking for at the bottom.  And it turned out that All Seasons Plumbing was out in Bladensburg, Maryland, quite a long way from me.  Plus it was after hours, so they were indicated as closed.

I looked at the various ads and those plumbers looked pretty good.  The first one was Len the Plumber, with 4.7 star over 3,600 reviews.  By contrast, All Seasons Plumbing only had one review, and it was only 4 stars.

It seemed to me that with all the internet reviews out there, plumbers nowadays must be on their best behavior.  They've always made a lot of money, so I expected to pay a few hundred dollars to clear the drain, but I figured all plumbers should charge about the same rate -- since if they don't, the reviews will tell.

So Len the Plumber was looking pretty good.  Just to be sure, I went in and clicked on the one star reviews.  Ok, so somebody was mad that they didn't show up when they were supposed to.  But Len the Plumber had already posted a nice apology.  No big deal.  And remember, the vast majority of reviews were five stars, from very satisfied customers.  

For completeness, here's what you see when you click on reviews:

Just a tiny percent are one stars.  On top of that, as you can see from the ad, they were "GOOGLE GUARANTEED" -- "Get it done right or Google pays you back."  All Seasons isn't GOOGLE GUARANTEED, so that's another mark in Len's favor. 

But just to be sure, let's click on the one stars:

Well that's interesting.  Today is two days later, and I see now there was a review accusing them of quoting a too-high price.  I didn't notice that one; perhaps I just stopped at the apology on the previous one.  That's a smart move -- take up space with an apology for a simple "delay" complaint so people don't notice or scroll down to the next one.  

Or perhaps I noted it, but also noted that it was obviously about a much bigger plumbing job than I was looking for -- perhaps installing a new sink from scratch.  If I'd scrolled down a bit further, I would have seen more:

Maybe the one about them not quoting a price would have concerned me.

But based on all those positive reviews, the 4.7 overall rating, and the GOOGLE GUARANTEE, I figured I couldn't go too far wrong.  So I went to their website, and found that they even had an $80 coupon!!

Ok, sorry dear reader, I keep discovering new stuff as I go.  I've been typing all this in and putting in the screen shots, all over the last hour.  So why does Len's website say it has a 4.8 average Google review, when we just saw it was 4.7?  When I clicked on the place on the website, it didn't take me to Google reviews, it just took me to a page with a bunch of glowing reviews.  Another google for Len the Plumber gets me this:

So here, just by doing a different Google search, the business has a 4.8 rating (not 4.7) but about 200 fewer reviews.  Perhaps that's just Google not being up to date.  But it does seem fishy, since Google is historically very up to date.  

The one star reviews that show up here are also less recent, and I couldn't see overlap between this set and the other set, but I didn't spend much time.  These one-stars also did include allegations of price gouging.  But of course I never clicked through them since by now everything seemed so great.

So that all may be fishy but it's a story for another day.  Back to my story.

I called and reached someone pretty much immediately.  I explained the problem -- including mentioning that I was the landlord and the unit was occupied by my tenant -- and asked for a quote.  He told me that the technician would give me the quote and that I could take it or leave it.  I asked about the 80 dollar coupon and he said that would be deducted from the quote.  In hindsight, I should have been more persistent in asking for the quote, but probably wouldn't have gotten one, as one of the reviewers noted.

We set it up for 11-2 the next day.  I gave them the tenant's phone number and let the tenant know.

Around 130, the tenant texted me to say they hadn't shown up yet and he hadn't heard anything.  At 1:58 pm we both got a text with a picture of a technician saying that he was on his way.  But then nobody showed up.  At 3:49 pm they called and said that the previous technician that they thought was coming was actually not working any more that day.  But now a new technician would be coming and they sent me a text to that effect as well.

At 4:37 they called me to say that the guy was outside but there was no parking.   I live in a 15-story high rise with a garage which is for tenants only.  But there's plenty of on street parking at all times.  I told them there was tons of on street parking.  They told me that their technicians aren't given credit cards.  We seemed to have reached an impasse, so I offered to go downstairs and pay for his parking.  My tenant had received a similar call so we both found the technician and I paid for his parking for two hours.

The tenant went back to his unit with the technician and I went to mine.  Not long thereafter, the technician called to say he thought the leaks were no big deal, and that he'd be able to clear the drain with his motorized auger.  I asked how much and he said "Nine eighty two."  I couldn't quite process that.  At first I thought maybe my 80 dollar coupon had brought the price down to nine dollars and eighty two cents.  But obviously that couldn't be right.  But 982 dollars for a clogged drain?!  That he could clear in less than an hour, most likely?  Why did I even go to law school?!  I should have been a plumber.

I asked him what it would have been without the 80 dollar coupon, and he said $1062.

I told the technician that I was having trouble processing that.  He assured me that was the going rate.  I googled it while we were speaking and found a site that said it could range from $250 to $750.  I told him that and he said that that was the national average while this was a high rise in Alexandria.  I almost paid for it right then and there -- my poor tenant had been living without a sink and the guy was right there ready to fix it.  As a landlord, didn't I have a duty to get this drain cleared?  

But I asked if it he could give me ten minutes to call someone else.  I called All Seasons, even though the website said they were closed.  I reached a service that asked if it was an emergency.  I said not really but explained the situation and asked if someone could call me back.  Ten minutes later nobody had called me back so I called the Len technician guy and was about to tell him to get to work, but then the call from All Seasons came in.  I took that.

The All Seasons guy said they charge by the hour, but overtime rates (time and a half) apply, and it would be $150 for the first half hour, and I thought he said $37.50 for half hours after that, but I figured even if it was $150 for every half hour, that was still only $600 max.  He said he could have someone there by 7.  Either he, or the dispatcher, had told me that there was no guarantee I could get an appointment during business hours the next day, so I was fine with the "emergency" rates.  

I called the Len the Plumber guy back, with the thought that maybe he'd just come down in price, but he wouldn't.  I made some remark about how it seems like Len's just charges whatever they can get away with, and he took exception to that remark, which made it easy for me to tell him we didn't need his services.  I called All Seasons back and confirmed that I wanted their emergency service. 

My tenant texted me at 7:24 to say the All Seasons guy had just gotten there.  I have a text from when the guy fixed it, but I can't figure out the time on it.  I just remember it was before 9.  A while later the All Seasons guy called me and told me the bill was $460.  I paid without complaint, although he said it was for 2 hours work when I don't think it was quite that long.  He also said I was paying $35 for the equipment; I guess the use of his motorized auger.  Bottom line is perhaps there was even a little bit of inflation there, but all within the realm of acceptability, esp. since it was "emergency service," and his price ended up being less than half of Len's.

So as I thought about it, I convinced myself that Len the Plumber's quote was not just a randomly inflated quote, but a deliberate scam.  Len the Plumber KNEW that this was a landlord-tenant situation, where the landlord was paying but the tenant was being inconvenienced by having to be there for the plumber.  So they deliberately inconvenienced the tenant even more -- they were supposed to be there between 11-2, and only at the end of that window notified us that they were on the way.  But then radio silence until 350 pm, when they called to say the last guy wasn't coming after all, and another guy was now finally on his way.

They knew that this was all making the tenant more and more impatient and annoyed, and would make me all the more likely to pay any price to make sure the tenant was happy.

I'm not sure if making me pay for parking was part of the scam, but it certainly was annoying too, and they had also called the tenant and got him to go down to meet the technician.

So by the time I finally got a quote out of them -- around 5 pm -- I was totally primed to accept it, out of consideration for my tenant.  And as above, they knew all that, and it really seems like they planned it.  In fact, they also knew that at 5 pm, it would be after hours for other plumbers, and I would know that, and so would be worried that calling another plumber on an emergency basis might cost me even more.  So that's all the more reason to think the whole delay was intentional -- not only would my tenant be impatient, but there would be no easy way for me to find a substitute.

I have no idea if all of those 5 star google reviews are fake, but I now know NOT to trust a 4.7 star rating with several thousand reviews.  And I've also been disabused of my fantasy that the fact that there are reviews out there has caused better behavior among plumbers and other contractors.

If you're wondering why I've referred to the guy throughout as a "technician" it's because that's what they called him (and the other guy who didn't come).  I'm guessing that they people they send for these jobs are not even licensed plumbers.  

So if you've read this far, the recommendation is:

STAY AWAY FROM LEN THE PLUMBER . . . THEY WILL CHEAT YOU IF THEY CAN!  

Where are the Ivana Trump Death Conspiracy Theories?

I read the Washington Post account of Ivana Trump's death and noticed that many of the readers' comments were to the effect that the death was just too convenient (coming a day before the scheduled depositions of Trump and two of his and Ivana's children in the NY civil fraud trial) to have been an accident.  

One of them pointed out that for a sociopath, even a delay in legal proceedings could be sufficient benefit to commit murder, and pointed out that that's what accused murderer Alex Murdaugh's alleged motive was.  Another pointed out that Ivana could have had damaging information.  Someone else wondered how often people die in falls where the cause of death is said to be "blunt force trauma to the torso" as opposed to e.g. the head or neck.

I then tried googling to find out if anyone has actually tried to assemble a real conspiracy theory about the death, but I didn't find anything.  One of the hits was a 5 minute youtube video that said that social media was "abuzz" with conspiracy theories about her death, but I watched the whole video and there was only one quote of one social media comment saying that it might not have been an accident.

Interesting how with Vince Foster's suicide, a large contingent of right wingers couldn't shut up about how he had actually been murdered by the Clintons.  But here, there's not a peep.

Anyway, I'm just a person who likes complete information.  As you might have seen from my previous posts, I understand that coincidences happen, but I also think it's a bit too dismissive to simply say "that was a coincidence" when something improbable has happened for which there might be other explanations.  

Yes, sometimes "coincidence" is clearly the best (and only) answer right at the outset -- if the only other explanation is that something supernatural has occurred, or that there was a conspiracy among hundreds of only-loosely-related people, then "coincidence" simply has to be the right answer.  That's the answer to conspiracy theories about the moon landing, the government's role in 9-11, the JFK assassination, the Pearl Harbor attack, and who wrote Shakespeare, to name just a few.

But we're not there yet in Ivana's case -- there are "non-accidental" explanations for Ivana's death that do not require supernatural intervention or a vast conspiracy.  That doesn't make them right; all I'm saying is that one needs to look at all the evidence and then decide which theory is better -- the "coincidence" theory, or the "other explanation" theory.  

As just about everyone knows, it's possible to convict somebody for a crime even under the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard based on circumstantial evidence alone.  That's because circumstantial evidence can be used to persuade a jury that innocence is not a reasonable explanation, given the number of coincidences that would have to have occurred to support it.  To be sure, our prosecutors and courts do not do a great job with circumstantial evidence; we've seen too many convictions, including of people on death row, overturned when the "real evidence," like DNA evidence, exonerates them.  But the basic point remains the same -- it is possible to make judgments based on circumstantial evidence, which basically means you're rejecting the "coincidence" explanation.  If you think OJ Simpson killed his ex-wife, you are rejecting the "coincidence" theory on the basis of your view of the circumstantial evidence.

The facts here do seem to warrant a police investigation.  Suppose the dead person actually was young and in perfect health, and one of her relatives was deeply in debt, a known sociopath, and stood to inherit a large sum of money from her death.  That would presumably warrant a thorough investigation, even if there was no sign of obvious foul play or forced entry.  Here, the facts differ only in matters of degree, so I'd think an investigation of some kind should be conducted.

Encouragingly, the Washington Post indicates that New York police "began an investigation."  So they probably know answers to most of the questions I'm going to ask already, but they haven't shared them with us.  (The article goes on to say they "found no sign of forced entry or obvious sign of trauma suggesting criminality"; one can hope that doesn't mean they stopped investigating.)

Questions I would want answers to:

1.  Who called the police?  Googling yields a quote, apparently from the police report, that the police came in response to a 911 call from an "unaided caller".  I have no idea what that means.  Could it have been intended to mean unID'd as in unidentified?  What are we to make of that?  

2.  The reports that I have seen don't say whether anyone else was at the scene when the police arrived.  As noted above, the police found no sign of forced entry, but how does that line up with the fact that there was a caller?  We can try to speculate to put the pieces together -- maybe the caller was someone who knew her and discovered the body and called the police and was there when they arrived, but the reports don't confirm or exclude that possibility.  But for all we know, the caller was there when it happened.

4.  The police reported that she was found unconscious and also that she pronounced dead at the scene.  I can't tell if that means she was alive but unconscious when they arrived, or if "unconscious" includes "possibly dead" but you have wait for a doctor to actually pronounce the person dead. 

5.  Just when was the time of death?  Can we figure out when the accident occurred?  Can we figure out how long she might have lived after she fell?  Whether she was necessarily unconscious from the time of the fall to her death?  Can one tell whether she moved herself after falling? Did she have her cell phone on her?  Did she normally have her cell phone on her around the house?  I've put all these questions together because they might lead in different directions; but part of the point is that if you fall down the stairs and experience trauma but haven't hit your head, you might be conscious enough to call 911 yourself if you have your phone, or to drag yourself to a phone if you don't.

6.  What sort of shape was Ivanka in?  She was former ski instructor, and is said to have been an alternate for the Czech team at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Japan (although snopes.com couldn't confirm this).  Obviously, 73 is a somewhat advanced age, but the elderly people that I've known that have been seriously hurt in falls have been in their 80s.  So the question is whether Ivanka was an "old 73" or a young one.  Rich people are often able to keep themselves in better shape as they age, and have more to live for, so without knowing any more I'd guess she was in better-than-average shape.  But medical conditions don't always respect wealth, so she may well have been predisposed to falling.  We just don't have enough information to know at this point.

7.  How far down the stairs did she fall?  Was there any sign of anything she might have tripped over?

8.  Echoing the Washington Post comment, how often do people die of blunt trauma to the torso, in falls or otherwise?

9.  Did she have balance problems, had she fallen before?

10.  Were there any drugs/alcohol in her system or evidence of drug/alcohol use?  Obviously if she were some kind of alcoholic, the fall might not be so unexpected.  But if there were drugs in her system that she didn't knowingly ingest, that could be a different story.

11.  What was her relationship with Donald Trump like?  I see from this People magazine piece that she continued to have good access during his Presidency, and that she gave him advice on his tweets, although after the election, she noted that he was a "sore loser" and looked forward to her kids moving on with their lives.  This could cut both ways of course:  the closer she was to him, the more damaging information she might have; but then again, if he actually liked and esteemed her, that cuts against him having her killed.

12.  Did Ivana have information that could have been damaging to Donald?

13. Is anyone doing an analysis to attempt to determine whether she accidentally fell or was pushed down the stairs?  Here's an example of an attempt to do that, although I have no idea whether the person's ultimate conclusions were accepted.

Of course, even if the answers to these questions make the "other explanation" more probable than coincidence, that still doesn't mean "coincidence" isn't the explanation, since improbable coincidences happen all the time.  And we haven't even gotten around to considering arguments from the other side -- e.g., isn't pushing someone down the stairs a particularly stupid way to try to kill someone, given the good chances that they might survive?

Regardless, the answers to these questions should either (1) lead to more evidence that supports another explanation, or (2) lead nowhere, in which case we probably just have to accept the coincidence explanation. 

No matter how much one dislikes the Trump children, one has to acknowledge that the death of a parent -- whether unexpected or expected -- is always hard.  As a fellow human being, my sympathy goes out to them.

 

Paul Krugman demonstrates the importance of understanding WRAITHS and Alt-QAnon

In "Wonking Out: Russian Gas, Acid Raid and Industrial Scaremongers,"Paul Krugman -- who is very smart and a pretty good economist -- seems almost surprised to impart the following "big lesson" to us:

The big lesson here is that you can’t trust industries to provide a reliable, or even honest, assessment of the economic impact of policies that might hurt their bottom line.

Of course, that's a major common sense premise of Alt-QAnon, although Alt-QAnon takes us much farther and deeper. 

He goes on:

This runs counter to the instincts of many people, including politicians. As I said, Germany’s leaders seem to have decided to believe industrialists who say they can’t live without Russian gas and have lashed out at economists who disagree. And in a way I can understand this attitude: Surely executives who actually run companies, who deal every day with business problems, know more about economic reality than nerdy guys in think tanks. Right?

So if you've read my various explanations of Alt-QAnon and WRAITHS in this blog, and have said to yourself something like "everyone knows that," here is Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman telling you that not everybody does, and lots of people think the opposite.  It even almost seems like Krugman himself is only just figuring this out, and just starting to analyze it:

But this presumption has been wrong time and again. I think for two reasons. First, industrialists who weigh in on policy issues that affect them have a huge incentive to talk their own book — to throw out numbers that are meant to scare the public into leaving them alone, rather than to provide realistic assessments.

Very Alt-QAnon-esque, although he is still thinking of the "industrialists" as individuals, acting in their own interests -- which is certainly true -- while the broader point is that the "industrialists" here have little volition whatsoever.  They are part of an artificially intelligent organism, and they are simply playing the role that has been assigned to them.  They would not have achieved that position if they had not been determined to be good for that role, so they will not deviate from it.

Krugman still is not sure that he's been persuasive:  

Oh, and for anyone saying that fine upstanding business leaders wouldn’t do something like that, remember Dieselgate — the massive fraud perpetrated by German automakers to make their cars seem far less polluting than they were.

Dieselgate is certainly a fine example, but it weakens his argument to point to one single foreign example to support his point, when this has been the basic way that industries have worked since the time of the East India Company and before.  Instead of just listing dieselgate, he could have easily listed hundreds if not of thousands of similarly egregious examples.  I've discussed other examples in various places in this blog, for example here,. and yet another one that comes to mind is the "ethyl" industry's push to put lead into gasoline despite lead's known toxicity, and the many.millions of deaths that caused.

But Krugman feels a need to bolster the argument with yet another point:

Second, executives within an industry do indeed know a lot about how things work in their business right now. There’s much less reason to believe that they have a good sense of how things might be done differently — of the adaptations and innovations they might be able to make in the face of a drastically changed situation. It’s like what happens in financial crises: Wall Street types are infinitely better than academics at guessing what will happen day to day, but when things fall apart, economists familiar with economic history tend to do better than those immersed in normal trading.

This may be a decent point, but it diminishes the basic point by seeming to suggest that perhaps the "industries know best" in times when there are no issues of change.  Going back to his first point (and Alt-QAnon's premise), businesses that are doing well will ALWAYS be resistant to change, unless they can see a way that the change benefits them.  Given that "change" is always a possibility, this is also a statement about industry's bias in favor of the status quo.  So the "second" point adds nothing to the first, and actually is a little bit dangerous -- it implies that when things are going well and there are no external sources of change, we can trust businesses.  But that's just not right -- there is always the possibility of beneficial change, and they will always resist it.

And now he has to tell us that the lessons go beyond the immediate point of his column:

The lessons here go well beyond the immediate scandal of Germany’s timid response to Russian atrocities. The same considerations apply to policies that are even more important: actions to limit climate change, which looks more than ever like an existential threat. Business leaders and the politicians who listen to them always claim that the economic costs of adequate action would be unsupportable. Don’t believe them.

So maybe he is slowly inventing something like Alt-QAnon for himself, even though it's been sitting there in front of all of us all of this time.

Not to belabor the point, but this all reduces to what Henry Hazlitt said in Economics in One Lesson -- that industries will hire the "best buyable minds" to make the best arguments that can be made for a given position.  An argument by an industry will necessarily support that industry's profit-making interests and if there is a better argument out there that does not support the industry, the industry will necessarily oppose it.

Note the subcaption of the article:

Kind of sad that a modern Nobel Prize winner is still working out what Hazlitt was telling us was basic economics back in 1946. 

Chess Grandmaster Sergei Karjakin's Mindless Patriotism

In explaining his recent open letter to Vladimir Putin (reproduced below), Sergei Karjakin tweeted: 

"My answer is simple. I am on the side of Russia and my President . . . . No matter what happens, I will support my country in any situation without thinking for a second!"

This is a guy who can spend up to an hour thinking about the right move in a championship level chess game.  He became a grandmaster at age 12 (a record at the time), and played Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship in 2018.  (He self- destructed, as everyone who plays Magnus seems to do; I felt sorry for him at the time, but I no longer do).

This should stand as one more reminder of how dangerous "patriotism" can be.  "Patriotism" is essentially an unthinking devotion to one's country, with the implicit premise that one's country is better than any other country.  In extreme cases, it becomes "my country can do no wrong," or else "my country -- right or wrong."  Sometimes, as in the case of the January 6 attacks, it can be invoked by those who are attacking the government itself -- e.g. "I'm a patriot because I happen to think that Donald Trump is good for America and that the election was stolen."

The MAGA movement demonstrates that you get to call yourself a patriot even if you don't like what the country is currently doing, but still love the country and hope to restore what you consider to have been its past glory.

Less blatantly stupid but more perniciously, nobody can be elected to any U.S. office unless they call themselves a "patriot" and talk about the greatness of our country.

But patriotism in all its forms is dangerous nonsense.  

The "my country right or wrong" catch-phrase, which was Tom Cruise's mantra in Born on the Fourth of July, apparently stems from a drunken toast given by Stephen Decatur at a Democratic-Republican party dinner back in 1816 after our "victory" in the war of 1812 and his own victory over the Barbary pirates in 1815.  Here's what Decatur said:

"Our country -- In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong."

The Hampton Roads Naval Museum blog contends that 

In this context, Decatur's toast is not a call for undying, blind patriotic devotion to one's country as the expression is often used in modern political discourse. It is rather a prayer for guidance, wisdom, and temperance in foreign relations.

I can't say that I read it that way -- to me it ends by wishing for his country's success, whether his country is right or wrong -- regardless of the cost in human lives and suffering -- which is pretty much what Karjakin is doing.  Be that as it may, here are a bunch of quotes about patriotism that are worth pondering:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. (Eric Hoffer)

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!  (Einstein)

One would expect the harmfulness and irrationality of patriotism to be evident to everybody. (Tolstoy)  

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind (Voltaire). 

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.  (Bertrand Russell)

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. (George Bernard Shaw)

One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.  (Aldous Huxley)

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. (Guy de Maupassant)

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.  (Denis Diderot)

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends. (Ambrose Bierce) 

Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. (Ambrose Bierce)

The final five make the point I've been making -- that we need to come together as a world sometime real soon, and mindless "patriotism" is a barrier to that: 

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world. (Eugene V. Debs)

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism. (George Orwell) 

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism. (Earl Warren) 

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. (Arthur C. Clarke)

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. (George Bernard Shaw)

If you search for quotes about patriotism, these are in the minority.  Many in the majority are well-intentioned -- they try to draw lines between patriotism and nationalism, and they claim that dissent in one's own country can be a form of patriotism, since it demonstrates how much one loves one's country.  But all of that seems pretty empty and pointless to me.  Patriotism qua patriotism is just as pernicious and useless as the quotes above make it out to be.  Anything that might seem "justified" as a matter of "patriotism" can readily be justified on better grounds.  Yes, the Ukrainians fighting for Ukraine are loyal to Ukraine and the Ukrainian way of life, and thus can be said to be "patriots."  But there must be a better term for the willingness to fight against an invading authoritarian army.  What's the sense in having a term that only really makes sense in wartime, as Diderot points out?

Back to Karjakin, which appears to be an example of blind patriotism at its very worst: 

Translated as:

On the other hand, it could equally be (1) evidence of how effective the Russian propaganda machine is, or (2) political propaganda itself.  It might be worth pointing out that this was first reported on February 27, only a few days after the war had begun, and before it was clear just how much suffering Putin was willing to inflict on the Ukrainian people. 

But let's not let Sergei off the hook so easily.  He possesses an extremely rare skill of being able to analyze situations from both sides and come to the most rational conclusion.  He could have waited for more data to come in, and he could have questioned his sources of information.  But he seems to have thrown that away for the sake of patriotism, which again makes my point of how harmful patriotism can be.

 

 

 

The Preventable War in Ukraine

 It took a while but I think I've figured out my angle on this war.

Obviously, Volodymyr Zelensky is a rockstar and I sure hope he survives.  If you haven't seen him in "Servant of the People," definitely check it out. It doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere, but it looks like you can catch some episodes on youtube, e.g. here.

I heard him say the other day that he is Jewish, which makes him all the cooler.  If I were a little younger and/or less burdened by family obligations, I'd seriously take him up on his offer to come to Ukraine and pick up a gun.

I've listened to lectures by Vladimir Pozner and John Mearsheimer who are pretty persuasive in the role we played in creating Vladimir Putin, which is what has led to the current crisis.  Don't get me wrong, Putin is way out of line here.  But we only got "here" because of our own ill-conceived foreign policy over the years since the end of the Cold War.

It started at the beginning. We had a golden opportunity when the Wall came down to "spend" our peace dividend -- and use our status as the only superpower in the world -- to help set Russia on a path to peaceful and prosperous democracy and capitalism.   I've previously explained some of the problems with our own implementation of democracy and capitalism both, but at least we're trying.  With various ill-advised exceptions -- Iraq and Afghanistan, to name two -- prosperous democratic countries don't start wars nowadays.  

So some kind of a post-cold-war Marshall Plan should have been a priority.  And over the years following, we should at least have modeled how a decent, prosperous democratic country should behave.  But we didn't do that either (Iraq, Afghanstan, etc).

And then there's the NATO question.  When the Wall came down, our Secretary of State James Baker told Russia that NATO would not move one inch eastward.  That vow was soon broken in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Poland and other former Soviet Bloc states joined up.  I've heard various commentators -- including the New York Times, in its analysis of Putin's recent speech -- question what right one country (Russia) has to prevent another country (e.g. Ukraine) from joining up with whatever "club" it wants to join up with.  That logic might apply to joining the EU.  But NATO is a military alliance AGAINST Russia.  That was James Baker's point way back then -- he realized that Russia saw NATO as a threat, and that no matter what form of government the various "buffer" countries might choose, they would not join NATO.  Remember how we reacted when Cuba wanted to host Russian missiles, and how we would react if Mexico decided it wanted to do the same?  We should have kept to the deal to leave NATO where it was, and concentrated on spreading democracy and capitalism rather than missiles.

But in 2008 in Bucharest we apparently pushed hard even to get Ukraine -- a large, well-armed country right on Russia's border that had been a key part of the former Soviet Union -- into NATO.   Germany and France rightly objected and it didn't happen.  

As Pozner and Mearsheimer explain, the continued expansion of NATO looks like an existential threat to Russia and to Putin, and also has provided a pretext for Russian aggression, including taking Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, not to mention the current war. 

Not only did we squander our opportunity to use our status as the world's only superpower to make Russia prosperous and democratic, but we've squandered numerous opportunities to display -- or gain -- the kind of moral authority that should have come with our superpower status.  Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were mainly driven by self interest, and ended up killing or ruining the lives of millions of people in those countries.  Our treatment of prisoners and the like didn't help.  All of that give rise to new waves of fully preventable terrorism, and it makes it rather hard for us to say that Russia had no right to invade Ukraine.  Seems like it had just as much "right" to invade Ukraine as we did to invade Iraq, and the "threat" that Ukraine poses to Russia is actually more credible than any threat that Iraq posed to us.  Obviously, I'm not defending the invasion of Ukraine; I'm just pointing out that we set the example for it.

And as I've said before, our handling of the pandemic was another opportunity to display and gain moral authority.  With a bit of foresight, we could have made sure that vaccines created at the U.S. Government's expense (like those of Modena and Johnson & Johnson) were rapidly delivered around the world.  The way to do that would have been to do whatever it took -- in addition to the original funding to ensure that all the technology we paid for and used to create the vaccines was in the public domain, such that generics would have been able to produce it.  For example, Moderna got over a billion dollars and NIH scientists either coinvented or simultaneously invented the vaccine; even if Moderna was entitled to a patent and trade secret protection, we should have simply bought out those rights and let the free market take over.  Yes, there would still have been supply chain issues, but those could have been resolved with more money.  The point was that vaccines needed to be in arms, and leaving control of the technology in the hands of private parties ensured that the rich countries would get vaccinated first and that many in developing world would still be waiting, which is exactly what causes new variants to arise.

And we could have done the same with the AIDS crisis in Southern Africa in the late 1990s and early 2000s -- made medications available for generic production, at whatever cost -- but instead let millions die.

I honestly think that if we had taken steps to make a working vaccine rapidly available to everybody, including the Russians, and thereby nipped the Covid thing in the bud, it would been a lot harder for Putin to point to portray us as irredeemably decadent, which is a major part of his pretext for invading Ukraine. 

Back to Ukraine.  Vladimir Pozner, in a slightly different context, reminded me of this quote from Herman Goering, days before he committed suicide:

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

That's essentially what the George W Bush administration did to drag our country into Iraq (remember the "mushroom cloud"), and it's also what Putin is saying to the Russian people.  He is saying that Ukraine is a threat to the Russian way of life.  He might not be completely wrong in that, which is why we should have done more to show the Russians all along a path to a better way of life for all.

yammering about the end of democracy

With the anniversary of the January 6 fiasco, there's been a near continuous yammer-fest in the liberal press about how the end of "democracy" may be approaching. Examples are Jimmy Carter and the The NYT Editorial Board.

The liberals are right to be concerned -- it's quite clear that nearly half of the voting public would prefer a narcissistic lunatic to a "liberal."  And it's also clear that a large percentage of that near-half think that Donald Trump -- the narcissistic lunatic in question -- is actually somehow good for America.

This should not really surprise us.  Deep down, most people believe, and have believed since the time of Plato, that the best kind of government would be a benevolent dictatorship.  The problem is just that liberals would like a benevolent dictator with liberal views and conservatives would like a conservative one. Trump supporters are people who have figured out that normal politics have let them down, and would like a leader like Trump. 

As I think I've made clear before, Alt-QAnon teaches us that both political parties are WRAITHS and both are under control of more wraiths -- mainly corporations but also organized religion (even Obama had to pretend to be religious to get elected) and entities like QAnon.  Just because a wraith has its own form of intelligence doesn't mean it can't be essentially controlled by another wraith or even a human being.  The CEO of a company might control the company, just as the leader of a religion might steer the religion in one direction or another.  But in most cases, the wraith outlives the human leader, just as in all likelihood the Republican Party and QAnon will outlive Donald Trump.  

In other words, it's been a while since we've actually had a "democracy" here, in the sense of rule by the people.  So the people who are suddenly concerned that democracy might be under threat are missing the point.

Right now, we're seeing the Democratic Party wraith do what wraiths do best -- attempt to take advantage of a situation to increase their power. 

Here, the situation was the narcissistic former President's refusal to acknowledge that he had lost the election, and his ability to somehow, despite a lack of rudimentary speaking ability -- stir up a resentful, rag-tag mob that then shambled toward the Capitol, probably with no particular aim in mind.  

At some point, the wraith underlying the mob -- the separate intelligence that everyone agrees mobs have (see, e.g., James Madison: "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”) -- took over, perhaps when the mob realized that it would actually be possible to get to break through the thin line of Capitol Police and get into the Capitol itself.  At that point, the members of the mob were simply pawns of the mob itself, swept into the Capitol by the mob's separate volition.  Sure, some of them were both willing and thrilled to breach the Capitol; it just seems unlikely that even the majority of them had that intent after hearing Trump's speech.  But when the mob as a whole -- the wraith -- figured out that it could get in, the foot soldiers simply followed, some giddily and others blindly.

None of this excuses Trump for spreading lies about the election and giving the mob its start.  

But no matter how the January 6th attack had played out -- even if it had lasted longer, caused more damage, and taken more lives -- it was never a threat to our "democracy-by-wraith."  Biden would still be President today.  That's because our founders thought about this sort of thing, and set up systems to ensure that a takeover would not occur.  Many believed that George Washington should be made King, because everyone knew he would always act in the country's best interest.  But cooler heads prevailed, and realized that if too much power is concentrated in one office, eventually that office will fall into the hands of the wrong sort of person -- someone who either does not have the nation's best interest at heart, or has a warped and anti-democratic view of the nation's best interest.  So we have checks and balances that ensure that too much power doesn't fall into the wrong hands.  Trump could not have undone the election.   

My point is that the Democrats are using this event for political gain, and the individuals writing about it are not really trying to learn from it.  

There are two lessons they should be learning:

First, it is possible, even in this day and age, for a demagogue to stir up a mob and incite the mob to violence.  That means that any time you have a demagogue addressing a group of supporters that might turn violent, you need to take precautions, especially if the violence might be carried out against an institution of government.  In this regard, perhaps our democracy should take a page from our own sorry past, or else look to see how other countries put down protests that get out of hand.  Firehoses and tear gas.  Problem solved, for next time.

Second, we should be taking steps to reclaim the democracy that we've already given away.  The simplest way to do this is to become politically active, and embrace and spread the principles of Alt-QAnon, and either run for political office or vote only for candidates who recognize the problem and are committed to doing something about it.  The same people who were so easily "converted" by the lies of  QAnon should be all the more convertible by Alt-QAnon, which is the truth.

Go for it.