WTF?

     Russia has just demonstrated an anti-satelite killer missile. As a child of the Cold-War and spy-fiction of the time, the old USSR played a pretty credible game of brinksmanship. They had their classic fuck-ups, as did we, but it was more "Day of the Condor" than "Spy vs Spy". This latest achievement was right out of "Doctor Strangelove"; Trumpian in its incompetence. The old Soviet satellite which they Rittenhoused, spread a debris field that endangered the Spacelab, comprising an international crew, including a Russian. This very real threat to their lives, and the science being carried out, endured through nine orbits of the earth. 

      In the old days this event would be kept off of the front page. It would be something they would allow to be leaked. So that we are pretty sure of their new capability, but not too far away from deniability. And they would have shrouded the evidence from public notice. Not so today. The Russian general in charge of this test could not have thought too much about the the consequences of 

 careless execution. Here, in this country we have become used to a government unconcerned with careless execution. What happened to the world's two pre-eminant intelligence and military organizations, that they seem so completely incompetent?

     The mediocrity of the meritocracy is what happened. France learned something about that in WWI. The sons of the aristocracy were the officers in the French army. You did not rise to the officer class, you were born to it. Consequently the Maginot Line, that was to stop German tanks from invading, did not hold the vehrmacht up long enough to light a Gouloise. It took many months, and the introduction of American Doughboys to stem French losses and start pushing the Germans back towards Belgium. We retained that military competence in the post WWI years, even as we battled the great Depression and failed to keep our promise to the Bonus Soldiers. While we were battling the collapse of our banking economy, Russia was creating a government with no czars, based on a Marxist economy not intended for an agricultural nation. Both nations were capable of building the next generation army capable of battling Nazi Germany on two fronts, while concurrently battling Imperial Japan on the other side of the world.

     There was a wonderful novel from Graham Greene in about 1959 called, "Our Man in Havana", that poked fun of MI-6. The conceit is that they believe that the have a local informant that owned a vacuum cleaner store in Havana. A movie version with Alec Guiness is equally good. The culture of literacy at that time was sufficient for people to understand the context 'conceit' is being used. Today you can barely find someone who knows foment from ferment. 

     As with the U S in the period from 2000-to-2020, so with Russia in the period from 1990 to present. The collapse of competance in a powerful nation is a development of autocratic leadership, I believe. A nation led by cautious, thoughtful leaders, with a cabinet of sub-leadership that are led by people skilled in their field will manage to muddle their way through a sticky situation. A nation led by a tight group of power-hungry autorats will eventually fail, mostly because of the toll of the slaughter. The sub-leadership level are there as a personal award by the chief, which can be revoked for disloyalty. To say a truth to the king would be to kill the goose laying the golden eggs. Warren Harding had his 'kitchen cabinet, Trump had his, Hitler had his some 70 years ago, Putin too, has his cabinet of satraps, quailing should there be a sudden mistake. And that is what began this investigation. How could a pretty good space program/intelligence organ make such a stupid mistake? 

     There was a black female mathmetician who worked for NASA in the 1950s and '60s. Her calculations became the orbits taken by astronauts training for their trip into first earth, then lunar orbit. These calculations were done on blackboard with white chalk. This was before even the pocket calculator. We did not know Katherine Johnson, her contribution, or her skin color until she died in 2020. At a time when black children were being blown up at church, and Bull Connors police dogs attacked civil rights marches, she was sending white boys into space, and back. It should be noted that every one of those astronauts were at the peak of their skills. They were young men who had had many occasions to, "fly by the seat of there pants". But they were disciplined and rapid thinkers, qualities that got them through many scrapes. Not one of those white boys with the "right stuff" achieved entrance into the rarified world of astronauts by virtue of daddy's fortune and influence. They earned their merit by displays of exceptional competence. By the same token, none of those potentially dangerous situations they encountered on the frontiers of space were the result of Katherine Johnson's calculations. She achieved her part in the space program by the same displays of exceptional competence. Yet, because she was doubly-cursed to be both female and black, she remained an unsung shero. 

     This is the free-radical that transcends mediocrity and meritocracy and propels us into the moon-shot. This is the free-radical that makes for people of exceptional merit in business, the military, and governement. Should you introduce a sycophant into those spheres you invite mediocrity and mock merit. In the same way that Vladimir Putin has used a tight group of oligarchs to capture his nations wealth, so did Donald Trump use his cabinet of ass-kissers to strangle our democracy. Trumps party even runs elections in the same way Putin runs his. Maybe Trump and Republicans lack the brutality of Putin, but the ferocity is there, and the efficiciency.