The Most Disturbing Aspect of Lewis -- Life Expectancy

 

So, turning from what CS Lewis puts in the devil's mouth in the Screwtape Letters and what he says in earnest in Mere Christianity, we can make some attempt to understand some of his more potentially disturbing thoughts about Christian living and a Christian society.  He endorses social activism as a means to Christianity and rejects Christianity as a means to social activism.*  He endorses individual hobbies and does not address clubs addressed to hobbies.  He is not opposed to novelty in people's individual lives, only to endlessly chasing after new thrills and never seeing anything through, but does not address novelty in the larger society.  And he appears to endorse flexibility toward time, although this is not well addressed.

But there is an even more disturbing current seen repeatedly in the Screwtape Letters, which he does not address at all in Mere Christianity.  In the section on novelty I said, "[I]f we are to take Letter 25 at its word, really Christians should look and act exactly the same as they did back in Constantine's day . . . and that fact that anything at all has changed since then is the devil's work."  The obvious response to that is that if we still everything the same way we did in Constantine's day, doctors would still put leaches on their patients and there would be no vaccines against childhood illness.

Then again, Lewis -- or at least Screwtape -- might very well see that as altogether a good thing.  At least, that is the impression I get from Letter 5, Letter 28, and Letter 31, all of which distinctly seem to see longevity as a bad thing, and the shorter the life expectancy the better.  Letter 5, at the beginning of WWII, laments that war leads to many people dying young and makes people come face to face with their mortality.  Letter 31, the final one, laments the "patient" being killed by a bomb and going to Heaven, "No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation."  

But Letter 28 is the really creepy one.  Screwtape warns Wormwood not to let the "patient" be killed in the latest air raid or his soul will be lost.  He says that the majority of the human race dies in infancy (presumably before the devil had the opportunity to tempt) and a good many die young.  He also says that the young instinctively crave Heaven and lack attachment to this world.  The best chance of winning a soul, he says, is to keep the "patient" alive as long as possible to wear him down through disappointment and disillusionment -- or, alternately, to tempt him to worldliness by success.  He even says "[Humans], of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good.  But that is because we have taught them to do so."  

So apparently Lewis does not see the self-preservation instinct as our deepest seated instinct, but as a temptation by the devil that corrupts our natures.  And, indeed, he sees it as something that grows over time, while young people have no real attachment to staying alive at all.  If one takes Lewis at his word here, he sees the shorter the life expectancy the better and dying as young as possible as optimal.  Nor does he address this issue in Mere Christianity.  

He does say that since societies rise and fall but individuals have immortal souls, the individual is more important than the society, and that this is the difference between democracy and totalitarianism as well as between Christianity and atheism.  Presumably he would make an exception here, and say that it is important for some people to live long enough for the species to reproduce itself.  And by reproduce itself, I mean not just give birth to the new generation, but to raise them to adulthood -- at least the minority who live that long.

Still, if one takes Screwtape at his word, it would appear that Lewis's ideal is a society is a return to the good old days when women routinely had ten or twelve babies and saw half of them die in infancy and maybe a quarter die young.  Once the two or three who survive marry and start families of their own, the older generation has done its duty and the sooner it dies off, the better their chances of Heaven.  And yes, I know, the devil should not be taken at his word.  But if that is not Lewis's view, then he really should have clarified it in his more serious work.

What Was Hamas Thinking?

 

Look.  Clearly I will never be able to get into the head of a twisted death cult like Hamas, and it would be a mistake to expect them to be rational as we understand rationality.  But it does seem a safe assumption that the current war is not what Hamas had in mind.  Hamas may not be rational as you or I understand rationality, but I do expect them to be at least rational enough not to start a war unless they seem some possibility of winning.  And they must have understood that their October 7 attack necessarily meant war.

One suggestion has been that Hamas had great confidence in its underground tunnels and expected to wear the Israelis down in tunnel warfare until they gave up and left.  And, indeed, it is entirely possible, not to say probable, that the Israelis will end up deciding that they will never be able to root out Hamas and are facing an endless insurgency and withdraw, leaving devastation behind.  But it is hard to see the point there.  Given the choice between being invaded, having your country laid to waste, and wearing down the invaders until they give up and leave versus not being invaded in the first place, not being invaded in the first place seems like very much the better option, even for Hamas.

A more likely explanation is that Hamas engaged in maximally provocative acts in order to provoke an Israeli over-reaction in hopes of setting off a wider war and (presumably) forcing other countries to come to their rescue and (presumably) destroy Israel while they were at it.  If that was the plan, the result is mixed.  Hezbollah has bombarded northern Israel, but without having any real effect on the war in Gaza. The Houthis are blocking shipping through the Red Sea.  But other than that, most Arab governments seem quite happy to see Hamas destroyed.  

And, in fact, thinking things through a little further, it increasingly appears that Hamas did not think things through.  If the Arab powers were to come to Hamas' rescue, who would that be?  Certainly not Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not unlike Hamas. It is a formidable defensive force, with the ability to wear down Israeli invaders until they give up and leave, but, like Hamas, it has no real offensive capacity.  Like Hamas, it can fire rockets and commit acts of terror and mayhem, but it has no power to seize and hold territory, or to conquer and subjugate. 

Furthermore, as a matter of basic geography, the only country with the proximity to come to Hamas's rescue is Egypt, a longstanding enemy of Hamas.  Jordan is the next best alternative -- it has not border with Gaza, but might come to the rescue if it could cut across Israel, something it shows neither the desire nor the capacity to do.  Syria might be willing to do such a thing, but is either mired in civil war or still recovering from civil war.  Iran is an ally, but is would have to cut through Iraq, Syria, and Israel to come to Hamas' rescue. 

As I understand it, Hamas also did itself no favors by not consulting with any of its allies in advance, and thereby sought to commit them to a larger war without asking first.  Hamas's allies were not amused.

Straits of Tiran

Houthi attacks on shipping are actually interesting.  It is true that in 1956 and again in 1967, Egypt sought to close the Straits of Tiran to Israel, cutting off Israel's sole port in the Red Sea.  In both cases, Israel saw that as an existential threat and went to war with Egypt (highly successfully, both times).  This time, the Houthis are cutting off traffic to the entire Red Sea and Israel appears to be greeting it with a shrug. Of course, the effect is to cut off traffic to the Suez Canal and force it around the African continent.  Presumably this means a significant loss of revenue for Egypt.  Maybe it is intended as a form of pressure on Egypt to come to the aid of Hamas.

More plausibly, Hamas' provocation of Israel to attack and actions to maximize civilian damage may have been intended to incite popular uprising throughout Arab countries and force them to come to Hamas' aid.  So far that has not happened, but Hamas may be hoping that it will if the war continues for long enough.  Certainly that would account for Hamas' insistence on utterly unrealistic conditions to any truce during negotiations ahead of Ramadan.  Ramadan seemed like the best opportunity to set up such a revolt, but so far it has not happened.  Personally, that remains my biggest fear.

The alternate explanation I have heard is that Hamas does not understand the nature of Israel. Hamas regards Israel as a settler-colonial state and hopes that if they keep up the pressure, they can induce Israel to give up and go home, just as the French eventually gave up and went home in Algeria.  If that is Hamas' believe, then they will be disappointed.  The Israelis are home.  They have nowhere to go.

Volume V: The Steele Dossier, at Last, Starting Page 846

 

So, after finding a "grave counter intelligence threat" from Paul Manafort's association with a Russian spy and secretly providing him information; after discussing Roger Stone acting as a conduit between the campaign and Wikileaks; after mentioning a strange suggestion by the Miss Universe president that the Trump Tower meeting with Russians was initiated when the Russians offered "emails from the Democrats and dirt on Hillary;" after finding evidence that George Papadopoulos was a useful idiot; and after finding what looks very much like evidence of criminal intent by the campaign when they told an informal agent scouring the dark web for e-mails:

I talked to Steve who will compel you to turn over to us all 30,000 emails you located and referred to Wikileaks. BB wants to publish them first. We do not give a rats ass what happens to you and will turn you over the the (sic) Feds for prosecution if you do not comply.

After all that, the Senate Intelligence Committee turns to the Steele Dossier on page 846 and finds it to be a total dud.  To be clear, just because the Committee found the Steele Dossier to be a dud does not mean that they considered it unimportant.  Volume V devotes about 84 pages to the Steele Dossier.  By way of comparison, that is less than the 142 pages devoted to Paul Manafort, less than the 140 pages devoted to the Trump Tower meeting, about the same as the 88 pages devoted to Roger Stone, more that the 62 pages devoted to George Papadopoulos, and much more than the 10 pages devoted to scouring the dark web.

 In general, the Committee found that the Steele Dossier contained dubious material, and that the FBI seriously exaggerated Steele's value as a source.*  Steele declined to be interviewed in person, but submitted written answers.  There is some discussion about the reliability of Steele's sub-sources, much of it (unsurprisingly) blacked out.  Discussion of possible disinformation is also largely blacked out. It also stressed (pp. 881-886) that Steele also did work for Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch who Manafort owed large amounts of money to, that Deripaska is likely to have become aware of what Steele was doing, and that may have been a source of disinformation.  There is no mention in the dossier of Deripaska's business ties to Manafort, or of Deripaska at all.  Steele and Fusion GPS also did work for Natalia Veselnitskaya, although they were apparently not aware that she met with the Trump campaign, nor did Veselnitskaya even know of Steele's existence.  

Most of what Volume V has to say about Steele's association with the FBI is old news, having already been discussed at length by the Office of Inspector General.  The Committee confirms that Steele was attempting to contact the FBI before it opened its investigation of the Trump campaign, but did not actually contact the investigating team until well after. It also confirms Steele's leak to Mother Jones and firing as a result.  Like the Inspector General, Volume V finds that Steele was not as reliable a source as claimed, that the FBI did not investigate him thoroughly enough before using his information to obtain a FISA warrant, and Steele continued to convey information to the FBI through the back door after he was fired, and other intelligence agencies distrust of Steele's materials.

What the Committee did reveal that was new was that Steele's reports, or at least notes summarizing the reports, were circulated in the upper echelons of the State Department, including to Secretary John Kerry.  The number of people in government who knew at least something about Steele's reports an did not leak them is a convincing refutation of any claims of a "deep state" plot against Trump.

Marc Elias

Also new were the report's discussion about Steele's relationship with the DNC.  I found the revelations rather disturbing -- not because the DNC as knowingly doing something improper, but because of the extraordinary lengths DNC personnel went to not to know what was going on.  It suggests that they knew the whole business was shady.  It is not news that Fusion GPS was originally hired by Trump's primary opponents to research his business background for shady dealings (pp 856-857). Owner Glenn Simpson apparently found enough to convince him that Trump should not be President.  When it became clear the Trump had the nomination secured, Simpson decided that, rather than let his services go to waste, he should offer them to the DNC, knowing that the DNC would pass any such information to the Clinton campaign (p. 857).  The DNC did not hire Fusion GPS directly but acted through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which acted through Marc Elias. This is apparently a routine practice and done to create an attorney-client privilege for any materials (pp. 857-858). Elias knows more about election law than anyone else in the country, and presumably knows how to stay within the letter of the law.  The whole business nonetheless feels profoundly sleazy.  Elias apparently thought so as well -- he hired a lawyer when the Committee wanted to interview him and answered only through counsel.

The original plan was simply to investigate Trump's business background and look for dishonest dealings (p. 858). When Simpson suggested looking into Russia ties, Elias was eager, not because he suspected any ties between the campaign and Russia, but simply because he assumed that all business dealings in Russia be thoroughly corrupt (p. 861). Simpson hired Steele in May or June, 2016 to look into Trump's business dealings (p. 862).  Recall that the first sign of any Russian involvement in the campaign was on June 14, 2016 when the Russians were found to have hacked the DNC.  Steele delivered his first memo on June 20, 2016 (pp. 864-864).  That was the one with the sex tape being used for blackmail.  Simpson said, first, that this came as a complete surprise, and that in the clear light of hindsight, maybe he should have discounted it (p. 864).

Then there is the whole disturbing issue of who knew what -- or rather, who was at pains not to know what.  Simpson did not tell Elias that he was passing information on to the FBI.  Elias knew that Fusion has hired an overseas contractor, he refrained from asking any details and denied knowing that the contractor was providing non-public information (pp. 859-860).  Fusion GPS gave Elias weekly briefings, sometime the original documents and sometimes summaries (p 860).  Elias gave the Clinton campaign oral briefings, but generally refrained from putting anything in writing (p. 860).  The Committee was unable to determine how much information in the dossier was passed on to the DNC and the Clinton campaign (p. 860).  The campaign definitely did not receive the memos, and did not learn about Steele or the dossier until Buzz Feed published it (pp. 858-859).  The media appear to have known more about the dossier than the campaign (and refrained from publishing).  DNC Chair Donna Brazile apparently received a call from the press in November asking if she knew M1-6 was on their payroll.  Brazile asked Elias, who said, "You don't have to know."  Brazile did not inquire further (p. 859).

All in all, one comes away with the impression that Elias' actions, though not illegal, were at least irregular, and that he was doing his best to protect the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and even himself from knowledge that could be damaging.

__________________________________________________
*And now, given recent developments regarding Alexander Smirnov, maybe it is time for the FBI to reconsider how it assesses source reliability.  I recognize that they need to use disreputable people to get close the the disreputable organizations they are spying on, but there needs to be a way to take disreputability into account.

Another Disturbing Aspect -- Must a Christian Society Reject Novelty?

 

Another disturbing aspect of what a Christian society might look like comes from Letter 25 of the Screwtape Letters.  In a number of places the Letters mock the idea of making the future better than the present and seem to suggest that you should be happy with what you have now.  Admittedly, this was written in the time of Communism, which showed a willingness to commit the most ghastly crimes in the present in the name of a better future, so it was a legitimate thing to worry about.  But Lewis seems to take this fear to extremes, perhaps even to the extent of rejecting anything new as the devil's work.

To be clear, Lewis is not opposed to all change.  To live in time, after all, is to experience a change. Something so simple as walking across the room is, after all a change. But there is good change and bad change.  And Lewis appears to define good changes as cyclical change -- the alternating of day and night, and of the seasons.  Bad change is non-cyclical change -- anything genuinely new.  

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.  This demand is entirely our workmanship. . . . Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer.  Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

Well, now, if the desire for anything genuinely new is the devil's work, that has some rather disturbing implications. It would suggest that imagination, creativity and innovation are the devil's instruments as well, and that the godly think to do is copy and never create.  In Letter 2, Screwtape mocks the "patient" for subconsciously thinking of Christians as something out of Roman times and finding it unsettling to see them wear modern clothes and seem so ordinary.  But if we are to take Letter 25 at its word, really Christians should look and act exactly the same as they did back in Constantine's day (Constantine legalizing Christianity is presumably at least one novelty we can accept) and that fact that anything at all has changed since then is the devil's work.

So is Lewis's ideal of a Christian society one that makes an ideal of absolute stasis and rejects all things new as the devil's work?  I am not suggesting that such a thing would be possible, you understand.  If it is hopelessly utopian to expect a Christian society to have zero divorce and zero crime, it is even more absurd to expect it to have zero novelty.  But will it regard stasis as at least the hypothetical ideal and anything new as innately evil?

In reading Letter 25, I must admit I had never heard of conkers, so I looked it up in the Wikipedia.  Apparently conkers is a game in which two boys each put a horse chestnut on the end of a string attached to a stick and try to break each other's chestnuts.  Clearly it is an autumn game -- that is when the chestnuts come ripe.  One might object to it as a bit violent, but Lewis does not, so I will set that aside. More significantly, Wikipedia gives a history of the game, saying that the earliest reference to it is from 1821, at which time it was played with snail shells or hazelnuts.  Chestnuts came into vogue around 1848.  All of which raises an obvious problem.  Everything that is now traditional was once new, after all.  When conkers first came out, should all Christian parents have forbidden it simply because it was new?  And, if so, at what point did it become old enough to be acceptable.  If Christian parents catch their child with a new toy, should they take it away?  Or even destroy it?  And how is the spirit of tolerance toward individual tastes and interests to be maintained if any new taste or interest must be summarily rejected?

And, of course, people necessarily experience novelty in their lives.  The routine life cycle of growing up, getting married, finding a career, setting up a household, having children, etc., after all, calls for doing new things with one's own life, even if they are very old in the total scheme of things.  Which raises another question.  Assuming when at least hypothetically rejects all novelty on a society-wide basis, how far must individuals take it in their own lives?  No divorce, Lewis makes clear.  No shopping for a new church except (perhaps) under extreme circumstances (Letter 16).  So how far does one take that in other areas of life.  Once one finds employment, is finding a new job forbidden.  Once one sets up a household, is moving out of the question.  And must one reject any new hobby, new vacation spot and any new experience as the devil's work?  Buying new clothes or furniture will no doubt sometimes be necessary when old ones wear out.  Must they be exact replicas in order to avoid the temptation of novelty?  That will, presumably, be easily done in a society that never lets styles in clothing, furniture, etc. change.

So, am I caricaturing here?  Yes, I will admit I probably am.  Lewis really does address the issue of novelty more realistically in Mere Christianity.  He warns, reasonably enough, that the thrill of novelty invariably wears off, and that it a character fault to drop things when the novelty wears off and never see anything through:

[T]hrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there.

Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and becomes a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening. . . .  But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.

So apparently new things are not bad after all.  What is bad is chasing after novelty and only novelty and never committing to anything.  Settling down and making a long-term commitment does not preclude delighting in something new later on.  So maybe the desire for novelty is not actually the devil's work after all.

In fact, Lewis seems to see the endless desire for novelty as something else -- a corruption of the desire for Heaven.  Lewis does not pretend to know what Heaven means, and acknowledges that most of us are quite content in this world and are not aware of a longing for Heaven.  But, he argues, all of us really do yearn for Heaven without knowing it.  All novelty wears off.  Nothing of this world ever truly satisfies in the long run. Trying to satisfy this longing with worldly things can never lead to happiness:

He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type. They spend their whole lives trotting from woman to woman (through the divorce courts), from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is "the Real Thing" at last, and always disappointed.

Again, I agree, this is a character flaw.  It is also out of most people's price range, regardless.  Alternately, one can acknowledge that these yearnings will never be fulfilled and stop pursuing them. Lewis, instead, recommends recognizing that no earthly thing will ever fulfill these yearnings and see them as really a longing for Heaven.  "I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage."  Such an outlook is compatible with trying something new and enjoying it.  It just rejects making novelty an idol.

And really, if Lewis's true objection is not to doing anything new, but merely to making novelty an idol, one would think he could say so  more clearly, even when speaking through the devil.

Different Reasons to Oppose a Congressional Appropriation

 

Just for the record, I do not believe that the only logical, consistent, and principled reason to oppose any particular government appropriation is because of a blanket opposition to all government spending.  To the contrary, there are many perfectly logical, consistent, and principled reasons on might oppose any particular expenditure.

1. One could see the thing itself as something inherently immoral that should be forbidden outright.
2. One could see the thing as inherently immoral but not realistic to forbid.  However, even if the thing is not in itself forbidden, government should not fund it with taxpayer money because that forces all of us to be complicit in it.
3. One can see the thing itself as unobjectionable but not a legitimate government function that should be done by private actors. (Example:  Too Big to Fail).
4. One can see the thing morally worthy, but believe that it is not a legitimate government function and should be funded by private donations.  (Libertarians and some evangelicals see social spending in these terms).
5.  One can see the thing as a legitimate government function, but not a federal function and believe it should be debated and decided at the state level.
6. One can see the thing as an appropriate federal expenditure, but not a high enough priority to fund with limited resources.
7. Or one can see the thing as wonderful, but just too expensive.

All of these are perfectly reasonable reasons to oppose any given federal expenditure.

However, Republicans are not very good at articulating a lot of these reasons. Trained for decades in seeing all government spending as inherently bad, they have difficulty framing an expenditure in any terms other than an objection to the amount, which often does sound illogical, inconsistent and hypocritical.

I remember, for instance, when Bill Clinton introduced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, Republicans were very much in favor of its coercive and punitive aspects.  But they were outraged that a small portion of the bill was dedicated to social spending, such as midnight basketball.  Midnight basketball was a program for giving young inner city males something to do during peak crime hours (roughly from two hours before to two hours after midnight), such as basketball.  And here was the thing.  Their objections were almost always voiced in terms of outrage over the expenditure, even though funding for midnight basketball was only $50 million out of a $33 billion bill, or about .15% of the total.  Republicans never objected to the the spending on coercive and punitive aspects of the bill (the great majority), but they were outraged that a small amount went to social programs.  It seems a safe assumption that the objection was not to the amount, but the purpose. When Republicans were more honest, they said that they objected to bribing people to obey the law.

Fast forward to today, and Republicans keep voicing their objections to military aid to Ukraine in terms of the price tag ($60 billion).  But balancing the budget by cutting Ukrainian aid would mean cutting by several thousand percent.  Furthermore, Republican keep claiming that aid to Ukraine competes on a zero-sum basis with any other spending priorities they might have -- aid to Israel, border security, disaster relief, etc.  Oddly enough, none of these other programs seem to be in competition with each other.

On the other hand, maybe I am being too generous to the Republicans.  Maybe their purported objections to the amount of spending conceals other motive that may not be mentioned in polite company.  The Wikipedia article on midnight basketball believes that Republicans' real objection to midnight basketball was that its beneficiaries tended to be Black.  And it seems quite clear that many Republicans' real objection to aid to Ukraine is that they want Russian aggression to succeed.

Another Disturbing Aspect of Lewis's Christian Society -- Attitudes Towards Time

 

So, CS Lewis' vision of a Christian Society appears to endorse personal hobbies so long as they are pursued temperately, do not become a source of vanity or snobbery, and -- possibly -- are solitary and not pursued in groups.  Letter 21 of the Screwtape Letters raises another possibility.  Must one's hobby be pursued with one's door open, allowing anyone who wants to walk in and interrupt?  Because there are some thing in that letter that seem troubling, at least from the perspective of today's society.  

In Letter 21, Screwtape gives advise on how to make the "patient" irritable. What makes him short-tempered more than anything else is having a tract of time he thought he ad at his disposal taken from him.  As examples, Screwtape offers an unexpected visitor when the "patient" had looked forward to a quiet evening, or looking forward to time with a friend and having the friend's talkative wife show up.  These are small things, Screwtape says.  The best way to aggravate them into real anger is to encourage a sense of ownership of time:

Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.  Let him fee as a grievous tax that portion of his property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties.  But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright. . . . [I]f the Enemy [God] appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that the total service for even one day, he would not refuse.  He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder that listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and he would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one half-hour in that day the Enemy said 'Now go and amuse yourself'.  Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realise that he is actually in this situation every day.

Well, yes, listening to the conversation of a foolish woman is hardly comparable to, say, Christians being fed to lions.  But then again, most Christians will never be in that situation and most people spend most of their time dealing with much more petty annoyances.  But then again, Lewis manages to discuss some of those other small things, such as dealing with another person's annoying habits (Letter 3) or having food not prepared quite the way you want (Letter 17) without taking it to such melodramatic extremes.

And note the unstated assumption in that passage.  After all, there are two people here, the interrupter and the person being interrupted.  Lewis appears to be aligning God unequivocally on the side of the interrupter against the interruptee.  This outraged statement that you have no right to any of your time, and that God sides with the interrupter is also somewhat at odds with Letter 26, which addresses the "generous illusion conflict."  The basic concept here is of people ostentatiously yielding to the other person's wishes mostly in the interest of point-scoring, and the resentments that it can provoke. Lewis concludes from all this that maybe a little selfishness isn't so bad by comparison.  But apparently the Generous Illusion Conflict does not apply to an unexpected visitor.  In that case, the visitor in unequivocally right and the person looking forward to a quiet evening must be the one to yield.

Allow me to propose an alternative explanation for what is going on. Most of us do not resent the truly unavoidable or emergency interruption such as (say) a fire or a car accident or a medical emergency.  We resent the person doing the interrupting because that person is being -- by the standards of our society -- impolite.  According to our society's standards, if you plan to show up at somebody's house, you should call ahead and ask what is a convenient time.  Likewise, when the friends were planning a get-together, the one should have asked if he could bring his wife along.  It may be that standards of politeness to not allow you to say no even if that is what you really want to do.  But at least the advance warning gives the opportunity to prepare and, perhaps, to adjust one's schedule accordingly.  And this, in turn, is consistent with another point raised in Letter 26 -- unselfishness as taking trouble for others, or unselfishness as not giving trouble to others.  Screwtape emphasizes that women focus on taking trouble and men on not giving trouble, but does acknowledge that a good Christian should practice both. The unexpected visitor is breaking that rule.

Admittedly, not all societies share this viewpoint.  In many societies, visitors drop in on each other at all hours and no advance announcement is needed.  Indeed, I recall a high school teacher describing a foreign visitor as saying he found nothing so astonishing about our society as that even social visits had to be scheduled in advance.  That, in turn, is a reflection of how our wider society treats time.  We had a rigidity about time that is mostly a product of the Industrial Revolution and does stand out as unusual, all things considered.  The Industrial Revolution has freed us, to a considerable extent, of the tyranny of circumstances, but in return it has subjected us to the tyranny of the clock.  Time is set in specific block -- a time to get up, a time to make preparations for work, a time to commute, work time rigidly set.  Even leisure activities are often pre-scheduled, and even the recreation of radio and television shows were set at specific, inflexible times.  Is it any wonder, under these circumstances, that people have come to view time as a scarce commodity to be jealously guarded?*

So that raises an obvious question.  Lewis identifies courtesy as one of the Christian virtues.  But courtesy appears to be something like propriety -- arbitrary and culture bound.  Lewis's view on propriety seems straightforward and reasonable.  It is more important to have a firm standard than what the standard is.  Setting a standard may be considered morally neutral in the sense that many different standards work in different societies.  But it nonetheless is a moral issue in the sense that people must respect the standard of propriety because to break it will cause either lust or embarrassment.

So, it would seem that the same thing applies to courtesy (and, indeed, that propriety is just a sub-category of courtesy). What is courteous in one society may be discourteous in another.  One society's standard of politeness may mean scheduling social visits in advance and not showing up without notice. Another may mean always being open to visitors.  So I suppose the real question is whether Lewis considers this essentially a morally neutral question, such that either standard of courtesy will work?  Or would he consider the idea of ownership of time to be so noxious that a Christian society must adopt the pre-industrial view that visitors are always welcome?  And, if so, would that be part of a larger project toward abandoning our society's general rigidity about time?**

I see only one hint in Mere Christianity -- the comment that committed Christians "will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. "

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*I admit that even within our society, this rigidity about social visits is mostly a white collar phenomenon. Blue collar households are more likely to have relatives and friends drop in at all hours and to sit around and chat with the television playing in the background and no one paying attention.
**Another interesting point.  Our society is becoming less rigid about time in may ways.  Employers are instituting flexible hours.  Work from home is becoming an option.  Netflix and the like allows us to watch shows at the time of our choosing. And so forth.  Will this make people more flexible with their private time as well?

Some Disturbing Aspects of CS Lewis' Version of a Christian Society -- Secular Associations

 

So, in discussing what appears to be C.S. Lewis concept of a Christian society, I have generally thought it not so bad.  A bit repressive in matters of sex and family, perhaps, but very respectful of individual differences and tolerant on morally neutral matters.  And he seems to see many things as morally neutral, or at least morally complex in a way that does not allow for simple rules.  

But there are a few things in The Screwtape Letters that, if taken at face value, seem rather disturbing. Granted, not everything in The Screwtape Letters can be taken at face value. The devil is a liar, after all, and many of these issues are not addressed, or much less addressed in Mere Christianity, so maybe I am over-interpreting.  But let me raise them anyhow.

Secular Associations

Clearly in a Christian society, churches will hold great sway and influence. To all appearances, Lewis's concept of a Christian society would give a wide scope of individual tastes and interests in morally neutral matters. His view appears to endorse a wide range of hobbies and artistic expression.  So far, so good.  

But the unstated assumption appears to be that people will pursue their interests individually and in isolation. But this does not seem like a realistic assumption.  People who like, say, stamp collecting or building model airplanes do not necessarily pursue these interests alone.  They form stamp collecting clubs and model airplane clubs and so forth. What does Lewis think of that?  I ask because in Letter 25, Lewis puts in a plug for his other work by having Screwtape complain that the "patient's" new associates are merely Christian.  "They all have individual interests, of course, the the bond remains Christianity."  What does Lewis think of other social bonds, such a common interests?

The Screwtape Letters talks on several occasions about Christian participation in social activism.  Lewis is ambivalent on the subject.  On the one hand, social reform can be invaluable in building an actual Christian society, a thing that the devil naturally abhors.  On the other hand, Lewis sees two dangers in Christian social activism.  

One is the danger of people using Christianity as a means of advancing social reform, rather than social reform as a means of advancing Christianity.  "Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."  (Letter 7). Lewis discusses the same idea in more serious terms in Mere Christianity, arguing that Christian social reformers (such as abolitionists) have achieved many great things, but only when they kept their eyes on the next world instead of this. This does not seem like too much of a danger in mere hobby clubs.  It seems unlikely that people will seriously confuse stamp collecting with their faith, or see Christianity mostly as an argument for how to build model airplanes.*

The other danger is more serious.  Lewis appears to endorse individual interests and tastes both as part of one's God-given nature and as having a sort of "innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness" and see liking "any one this in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it" as a protection against vanity and snobbery.  (Letter 13).  But that assumes a solitary hobby.  Which leads to the other danger Lewis sees in social activism -- a general trust of institutionalized non-conformity:

Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tend to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and toward the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred with is entertained without shame because the 'Cause' is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. . . . We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.**

(Letter 7).  Note that these two things are essentially opposed to each other.  One is an argument for non-conformity, the other for conformity.  Of course, it is not clear that unfashionable hobbies will acquire quite the same sort of self-righteous intensity as unpopular religious or political organizations.  (Unfashionable artistic tastes might).  And people meeting to pursue the same hobby may give an opportunity to replicate the sort of vanity or snobbery that are unlikely to happen in solitary hobby.  On the other hand, at least some hobbies and interests -- team sports, for instance, or music -- seem necessarily to require associates and not be solitary.

Ultimately, Lewis is silent on this subject.

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*Although certain football players who are sure that God roots for their team may make you wonder.

**That is, of course, exactly the form the Christian Church took for its first few hundred years before the time of Constantine.  Lewis does not address that.

A Brief Comment on the War in Ukraine

 

I do recall my views on the war in Ukraine about a year ago.  In late 2022, Ukraine launched a counter-offensive and rapidly took significant swaths of land from the Russians.  The Russians launched a brutal bombing of Ukrainian power infrastructure in the winter, intended to freeze the Ukrainians into submission.  Russia also withdrew from the Black Sea wheat deal, raising the threat of global food shortages, and started bombing grain storage facilities and blockading Ukrainian ports.

So when 2023 rolled around and there was talk of another Ukrainian counter-offensive, I expected the ground offensive to be a success, just as it had been the previous year.  I had no idea if Ukraine would push the Russian forces all the way back to the 2014 borders, but I expected them to free vast swaths of territory.  But I did not expect even liberating all the territory back to the 1991 borders to mean peace, because the Russians would still have the ability to bomb Ukraine at will, and to blockade their exports.

Well, the exact opposite happened  The ground offensive failed to take any significant territory, and Ukrainians are facing the prospect of significant territorial losses.  But they have been highly successful in the air and sea wars, sinking about a third of the Russian's Black Sea Fleet,* breaking the blockade, and now doing significant damage in the air as well.

No real point here, just that things can be surprising.

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*Most of Russian's navy remains intact, but barred passage through the Straits of Bosporus.

When Did it All Go Wrong?

 

A healthy democracy does not choose Donald Trump as its President. And certainly, once he tries to overturn an election, a healthy democracy recognizes that he is a menace and bars him from office.

Which means that it didn't start with Trump.  America's slide from a healthy democracy has been going on for a long time.  So when did it start?  I have heard various candidates.  Once is the rise of Fox News, which distorted people's viewpoints.  Others point to Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, or Newt Gingrich and the new class of Republicans he brought to Congress.

Others have gone back further, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  The US has had at least two illiberal strains for a long time.  Both can be considered right wing, but they did not used to be partisan.  One was the the right wing illiberalism of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, mostly a Republican phenomenon.  The other were Southern segregationists, who were Democrats.  Each party had an illiberal faction, but its chances on a national scale were best if each party held its illiberal wing in check.  With Democrats embracing the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's, southern racists migrated over to the Republicans, allowing the illiberal forces to capture a party.  

But if that is so, it didn't happen over night.  When did the rot begin?

I do not claim to know, but I can say that the first hint I got of it was in the 1988 election.*  Ronald Reagan had won two successive landslides, but he was term limited out and showing signs of mental decline.  Democrats were feeling hopeful that it was their turn. And then Bush, Senior got nasty.  There was an ugliness to the election that I (admittedly quite young at the time) had not seen before, as if the prospect of a Democrat winning were some sort of outrage against the natural order.

Well, Bush Senior won, by a landslide, though not so wide a landslide as either Reagan election. His government was quite reasonable and moderate. And then in 1992, Bill Clinton ran and won. The election had not of the nastiness of 1988.  (Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, author of the 1988 campaign, had died in the interim).  

But no sooner did Clinton take office that Republicans began their freak out that has not ended since.  Led by Gingrich, Republicans won control of Congress during the midterms and made clear that a Democrat in the White House was an outrage that could not be allowed to stand.  The investigated everything from the use of White House personnel to answer letters to the White House cat to rumors of a Clinton body count.  They shut down the government and threatened a default on the national debt.  They appointed a special counsel to find grounds for impeach and ended up with nothing worse than an attempt to cover up an affair.  They impeached anyhow.  And paramilitary groups trained in the woods for violent revolution.

All of this during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, with steadily falling crime rate, and even a successful balanced budget.

My conclusion was that somewhere along the time Republicans had developed what all conservatives claim to hate most -- a sense of entitlement.  In this case, entitlement to hold the Presidency.  And maybe other offices as well.  Republican reactions to an Obama or Biden presidency has been part and parcel of the same, except with serious problems on a national scale.

But looking back on it, even that may not be the whole story.  Looking back on it, there were signs of something very wrong in the late Bush, Sr. presidency.  Again, I first noticed in 1989 when a man in Stockton, California aimed an AK-47 semi-automatic, modified to by fully automatic, at a school yard full of children and started gunning them down.  To me, it was obvious that something so lethal had no place on the street.  I soon found that not everyone shared my view.  In fact, it was then that I first started hearing the argument that the whole point of the Second Amendment was to make military firearms widely available so that the people could engage in violent revolution against their government, and that taking military-style firearms off the streets was "idiotic" and the work of "lunatics."  The in 1992, Randy Weaver, a white supremecist in Idaho with a large arsenal, had an armed standoff with the FBI.  An alarming number of people turned out to express their support for Weaver.  The FBI and ATF badly mishandled the situation and ended up killing Weaver's unarmed wife and son.  Dealing with fanatics with military style weaponry who considered armed resistance to government as their constitutional right was unfamiliar at the time. And the rise of Rush Limbaugh and all sorts of paranoia about the United Nations also got started at this time.

This was the reaction to having a moderate Republican in the White House.  So, looking back with the clear light of hindsight, I can only conclude that sometime beneath the surface, not only did Republicans develop a sense of entitlement to the White House, but MAGA Republicans (not that the word existed yet) developed a sense of entitlement to control of their party.

The country has not recovered yet.

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*Though not related, 1988 was also the first time Joe Biden sought the presidential nomination.

The Trouble with Man Bites Dog Stories

 

One of the reasons that stories about how dangerous Trump is are not getting any attention is that he was President once, after all, nothing disastrous happened (not counting 2020, but everyone seems willing to give him a pass on that and say it was not his fault).  So it can be hard to convince people that this time will be different.

The other reason is basically that our news media see Trump's worst antics as a dog bites man story. Everyone knows that Trump is a vindictive lunatic, so announcing that is not news.  Of course, everyone knows that Biden is old and that Hillary sent State Department e-mails on a private server, and somehow that managed to get regular coverage.

But OK, Trump is crazy is old news, it is dog-bites-man, whereas the latest criticism of Biden can be portrayed as man-bites-dog.

And I understand why the news prefers to focus on man-bites-dog stories.  They are rare and exciting.  But if all you get in the news is man-bites-dog and never dog-bites-man, it can give people a distorted idea of what is going on in the world.  It can make people fear to let their dogs out in the yard or take them walking because of all those crazed dog-biting men out there.

And it can make people lose their healthy fear of vicious dogs. After all, who ever heard about a dog biting a man?

How Democracies End

 

I don't usually do a blog post based entirely on quotes, and I don't approve of the practice, but this one from Bulwark is too good to pass up. (Much of it paywalled).

The author believes that most Republicans really do support liberal democracy and do not want to live in a dictatorship, not even a mild, Orban-style dictatorship.  Part of me thinks that is giving Republicans too much credit.  On the other hand, the performance of most Republicans in this regard has pleasantly surprised me. Since the 2021 insurrection, all defeated Republicans, with the exceptions of Kari Lake and Solomon Pena have accepted the results.  

So maybe Trump really is an aberration, and maybe if he can be kept out of the White House, our democracy can recover after he dies or becomes incapacitated.  But right here and now in the real world, he is knocking on the White House door and all polling suggests he will be admitted.  Republicans have not been able to stop him so far and won't be able to stop him in the future.  Jonathan Last, the author, explains:

I absolutely believe that a majority of Republican/conservative elites have no interest in authoritarianism.  The don't want to live in an Orbanist illiberal democracy.

It's just that they have other incentives that they want much more than they want *not* to live in an Orbanist illiberal democracy.

. . . . . .

It's just a matter of incentives.  If your highest incentive is something other than the survival of liberal democracy, then you will eventually become a tool for authoritarianism, because the aspiring authoritarian will align your incentives with his own.

I agree with the premise that when an authoritarian menaces democracy, the only way to save it is for the democratic forces all across the spectrum to set aside their differences and  join forces for the sake of democracy.  Such statesmanship has been all too uncommon.

And I see no sign of such statesmanship in the US today.  We are sleepwalking our way toward dictatorship and I have no idea how to stop us.

Back to Reality

Well, that was fun while it lasted, but back to reality.  The reality is poll after poll shows Donald Trump winning.  This is usually attributed to Biden being too old or maybe a general sense of discontent.  If the issue is simply Biden being too old, then the response is to find someone younger, who would easily defeat the unpopular Trump.  Or, if it is Biden's association with a specific issue, such as inflation or the war in Gaza, find an alternative without that baggage.

The trouble is that none of the alternatives seem to do any better.  All of them have their own weakness.  Biden is too old.  Gavin Newsome is from California.  Kamala Harris is not seen as up to to the job.  And so forth. 

All of this makes me think that the real problem is not with Joe Biden or any particular candidate.  It is a basic sense of discontent.  Republicans are outraged at a Democrat in the White House and will never be happy until the travesty is ended.  Democrats are hopelessly split on what they want and any attempt to please one wing of the party will end up alienating another.  

By contrast, I think Trump has the advantage of nostalgia.  Ex-presidents are invariably more popular out of office than they were while in office.  (GW Bush is a notable exception).  We have problems these days.  We had problems when Trump was in office, too, but people tend to view the past through a rosy haze and idealize it.  Look how popular Obama is now, compared to when he was in office.  Thus I think nostalgia is a major factor in his favor.

Nonetheless, and I know I repeat myself here, if anyone actually does find that mythical Democrat who can beat Trump, I don't see the point in all these elaborate plans for a brokered convention or stepping down or whatever are necessary.  The approach is simple.  Biden should:

1. Find the mythical Democrat who polls better than Trump;
2. Name him or her as candidate for Vice President;
3. Pledge to step down in his/her favor if he reaches the point of being unable to do the job;
4. Let the vice presidential candidate get out and have more visibility until people almost forget who the real candidate is.  This would actually use the age issue to Biden's advantage.  It would let people believe he was a mere figurehead and the vice presidential candidate was the real power.

As a matter of fact, I can even think of a new candidate.  She is a woman of color with real executive experience, federal experience, and even national security experience.  She is conservative enough to reach across the aisle to disaffected Republicans, and she is out of office now, so she will not have to step down from anything to take the job.

I refer, of course, to Nikki Haley.

Of course, it won't happen.  But I can dream.

The House Judiciary Committee Interview of Scott Brady

So, I took my own advice and read over the transcript of the House Judiciary Committee's interview of former West District of Pennsylvania (WDP) US Attorney Scott Brady.  What did I find out?

Well, for one, it got rather redundant in places as Democrats and Republicans kept harping on the same information over and over. But in general, the WDP was tasked with reviewing tips from "the public" about goings on in Ukraine. Brady and five other attorneys at the office took on the task, in addition to their usual work.  They did not have any compulsory tools of a grand jury investigation, such as subpoenas, so they were limited to checking open sources, looking through their files, and voluntary interviews of US witnesses.  (They did not talk to Ukrainian witnesses, pp. 136-137).  They threw out tips they considered disproven and passed other ones on the the relevant grand jury.  

Brady was at some pains to point out that this investigation was not unusual, and that it took tips from the general public, not just Rudy Giuliani.  Democrats established that Giuliani was the first witness the WDP spoke to, and that Brady personally attended the interview.  Besides taking tips from the "public," Brady's team looked through FBI files for relevant information, which is how they found Smirnov's report from 2017 that made a "brief, non-relevant" mention of Hunter Biden.  Because of the sensitive nature of the investigation, it required renewal every 30 days from 17 different people.  (Brady was emphatic that the number was literally 17 and he was not just being hyperbolic).  The investigation came to a temporary stop several times as they awaited approval, and was further hampered by COVID restrictions.  Brady also sensed a resistance from the District of Delaware (which was the district investigating Hunter).  In October, 2020, both districts received a directive from above to give a briefing to Delaware, including providing Smirnov's report.  Delaware made clear that they were accepting the briefing only because of orders from above.

The discussion of the FD 2023 report is . . . interesting.

Q And can you tell us about the process that your office went through to vet the information that's now contained in this FD-1023? 

 Mr. Lelling. You can speak generally to that. I would not get into details.  

Mr. Brady. So we attempted to use open-source material to check against what was stated in the 1023. We also interfaced with the CHS' handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.  

Q And did you determine if the information was consistent with the handler's understanding? 

A What we were able to identify, we found that it was consistent. And so we felt that there were sufficient indicia of credibility in this 1023 to pass it on to an office that had a predicated grand jury investigation. 

Q And did you determine that the CHS had traveled to the different countries listed in the 1023? 

Mr. Lelling. I would decline to answer that.

Mr. Lelling is Brady's lawyer.  The reason he gave was for refusing to answer was that the question was too detailed.  The same issue came up again later:

Q The ... Pittsburgh FBI Office obtained travel records for the CHS, and those records confirmed the CHS had traveled to the locales detailed in the FD-1023 during the relevant time period. The trips included a late 2015 or early 2016 visit to Kiev, Ukraine, a trip a couple months later to Vienna, Austria, and travel to London in 2019.Does this kind of match your recollection of what actions the Pittsburgh FBI Office was taking in regards to this. 

Mr. Lelling. Don't answer that. Too specific a level of detail.

Q You had mentioned last hour about travel records. Did your office obtain travel records, or did you have knowledge that the Pittsburgh FBI Office obtained travel  records? 

Mr. Lelling. That you can answer yes or no. 

Mr. Brady. Yes. (p. 93)

Scott Brady

It is clear from the indictment that as soon as the Delaware office looked at the travel records that the handler had, it became obvious that the source was lying because he was not in the places at the times that he said.  Another interesting note -- the handler operated out of Seattle.  It is not know whether the handler turned the travel records over to Brady.  If so, the lie would have been obvious.  As for closing the investigation into the 1023, Brady said that it was closed only in the sense that they were not able to investigate any further.  They forwarded the lead to Delaware (pp. 102-103).

The interview did not establish what percentage of the tips the WDP received were from Giuliani.  Democrats did quote the lawyer managing the Hunter Biden prosecution in Delaware as saying she did not want a briefing from the WDP because none of their information was credible, since it all came from Giuliani.  Brady responded that "some of the information" including the 1023 did not come from Giuliani (pp. 95-96), which I take as significant.  In describing sources of information, Brady said:

We had the information from Mr. Giuliani, and then we had developed work streams through discussions with other, either components within DOJ or other Federal agencies to run certain things to ground. But it wasn't limited to just Mr. Giuliani's information, yes. (p. 172).

This seems to suggest that the whole discussion of tips from the "public" was mostly a smoke screen, and that their actual information came from either Giuliani or in investigation of government files.  However, no one clarified this matter.  Another remark that seems rather startling, but that no one followed up on was Brady's statement that the only office that received "a" 1023 was Delaware (p. 150)*.  Note here that he does not say "the" 1023, i.e. the one from Smirnov that was under discussion.  Taken at face value, this would mean no one else received any 1023.  But no one followed up on this, and I should probably not leap to too many conclusions based simply on the use of an indefinite article. As for the information received from Giuliani:

There were a lot of names, which included details allegedly derived from those people, including, as I mentioned before, possible bank account records -- or I'm sorry, bank account numbers, email addresses, cell phones that would purportedly point towards evidence. There were a lot of -- there was information about a variety of schemes and accusations not limited to Burisma and Mr. Biden. 

In general, Republicans focused on the institutional resistance to the investigation.  Presumably their point was an effort to portray a "deep state" plot to protect the Bidens.  I suppose that is one possible interpretation.  I can think of others.  The FBI and DOJ may have been generally resistant because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.  Or they may have disliked the bureaucratic constraints on the sensitive investigation. (Republicans portrayed, and Brady agreed, that these restraints were extraordinary, even for a highly sensitive investigation).  Or they may have regarded Giuliani's leads as felgercarb and resented having to chase them.  There appears to be at least some confirmation of that last in the interview.

Democrats did not directly attack the credibility of the confidential informant, but focused on attacking Zlochevsky's credibility with open source statements such as interviews and news articles in which the participants denied any improper contacts with the Bidens.  I don't know.  I do not think if I were investigating I would give such things much weight for the simple reason that I would take for granted the participants were liars, and that what they said in a private conversation with a business associated would probably be more reliable than what they said on the record.  Probably the most worthwhile such public statement (pp. 141-142) was from the incoming Ukrainian Prosecutor General, who said he investigated the files and found no evidence to support the allegations.  

Democrats did not ask why, if  the confidential informant heard such explosive allegations in 2015-2019 and did not report them until 2020. Brady said that he asked for a follow up interview on the innocuous 2017 comments on the theory that Hunter Biden might not be relevant to the inquiry underway.  And yes, certainly it is possible that something that might not seem significant at the time might turn out to be significant later. But to me it just surpasses belief that an informant would hear anything so explosive as that and not report it until years later.  Even if it was not relevant to the immediate investigation, I would expect the handler to pass on the lead for a new investigation.

Other questions that seem significant but were not raised:

What percentage of your information came from Giuliani?

Did you get any tips from any other member of the "public?"  If so, how did the volume compare?

What percentage of your leads came from external tips versus search of internal files?

Did you activate any other confidential informants?

Did it concern you that all the information in the 1023 was unverifiable?

And, yes, didn't it seem strange to you that anyone would have a lead this explosive and sit on it for so many years?

Maybe the Inspector General can look into those questions.

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*The WDP was also in communications with New York City prosecutors about Giuliani and his associates being unauthorized foreign agents.  Brady was clarifying that the New York offices did not receive "a" or "the" 1023 report.