Book Discounts

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Leaders failing.

Leadership is an interesting concept, and I have tried to make it the centrepiece of some of my novels, without being too obvious. The leader may appear to be obvious, but recall just because someone is in front and there are a lot behind does not mean the one in front is leading. The others could be queuing up for a backstab! And the bigger the problem, the easier it is for a leader to fail. Brexit is a clear failure of leadership. In the first place, Britain was comfortable in Europe. There were the inevitable politicians who wanted out, but there was no pressing issue requiring an immediate vote. The politicians who called it really wanted to stay in, so first, why did they call it, and second, if they felt they had to call the vote, why did they not wait until they had mounted a campaign that made it much more likely they would succeed? Having called it, they then should have campaigned hard to maximise their chances of winning. Instead, they went through the motions, and seemed like stunned mullets when they lost. They then accused the other side’s campaign of being full of lies. That might make them feel better, but if it were true, why did they not point out the lies during the campaign? Did it not occur to them that when the voters voted the way they did, just maybe what the politicians and their rich friends wanted was not representing what the voters wanted?

As for how to go about it, there are at least two pieces of advice from Sun Tzu that should have gone to the top of the list: first, know thyself, and second, know the adversary. The second one is a little more difficult but the first should be mandatory. Accordingly, the first step must be to decide whether to leave, i.e.whether to honour the referendum, and whatever you decide must be final. At first sight it might look like they did that, but nevertheless a lot of the politicians have been hoping some reason will arise whereby they can flag the whole thing away and stay. What I think Theresa May should have done was to individually make each member of her own party pledge to honour the referendum, and to work for the betterment of Britain, or resign. If they refused to do either, then she needed to call an election, and ensure those who refused to go by the decision of the party were prevented from standing for the party. That could effectively be a second referendum, but it is pointless to continue when about a third of your team are busily trying to undermine you. In any case, she called an election without anything to do with Brexit, and that was not a fortunate result for her. Had she got her party to commit, when she went to Europe she could say Brexit is going to happen, no matter what. What we are now discussing is what our relations will be then.

That leaves the question of negotiation. I have done a little of this with a multinational company that lead to two joint ventures, so I have some knowledge of what is required. The very first step is to meet with your own team and get agreement on what the bottom lines are going to be. These are the things that if you do not get them, you walk away from the negotiations. It is important that these are extremely important, and there must not be many of them. These are NOT to be used to gain an advantage over the opposition, and they are not to try to force the other side to give something up. They are simply the things that make walking inevitable. For the Brexit negotiations, one of those required bottom lines might be the question of Ireland; whatever the outcome, Northern Ireland must continue to be treated the same way as the rest of the UK. That they never recognised this until apparently now meant that they have got themselves into a position where it is difficult to see how they can progress the way they wish to progress. If you tell the opposition that something is a bottom line, and it is a reasonable one, then they will accept it and try to work around it if they want to negotiate.

Which gets to the next point: each side has to see an advantage in the end position. To some extent, Europe cannot help but see Brexit as a negative, so the emphasis has to be to determine what advantages there are for Europe for what the UK wants. That means there have to be concessions, and here the UK have made many. However, there also has to be a clear point at which if the opposition wants too much, you have to be able to say no and walk. And one of the most important points is that when you represent your team, the other side must believe that all the team will stand behind you. Of course there are also times when you must say, “I must consult my team,” over something. The leader must never wing it, other than for minor issues.

The EU leaders have also failed. They have done their best to get everything they could, which is all very well, but if they demand so much that the whole becomes unpalatable, they too end up with nothing. What they have failed to recognise is the person fronting for Britain was not really leading. So far Britain has made quite a lot of future concessions regarding payments of this and that. No deal means all those billions of pounds are lost to the EU. The EU can also lose, and the tragedy is, the various failures of the leaders have most likely ended with a lose-lose scenario.

To change the subject entirely, Christmas is near, so I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and all the best for 2019. This will be my last post for the year, and I shall resume mid January.

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A hard science fiction epic with 18 major characters, four alien races, several romances, not all of which end well, treachery, and is set variously in 3 continents, the Earth-Moon L-4 space station, Mars, Iapetus, the asteroid belt and Miranda. Book IV of a series, but originally written as a stand-alone.

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International Tension

There have been two situations on the international scene lately that have the potential to bring the close of 2018 into the likelihood of a serious deterioration in international peace and prosperity, although the first is probably going to be put to one side after more arm-waving and pontificating. This one involves three Ukrainian naval vessels trying to get from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, and in particular to their port of Mariupol, the port for south east Ukraine. These vessels were stopped, some by ramming, and arrested by the Russian coastguard, possibly the navy, and FSB officers. The incident occurred at a place that would be within the territorial waters of Russia, although Ukraine does not recognize Crimea as being part of Russia, which would alter the argument. Ukraine states that it started just outside such territorial waters, but has not provided accurate and detailed coordinates and in any case the Ukrainian ships proceeded into clear territorial waters. There is apparently a 2003 agreement that the Kerch Strait is a shared waterway, which allows free passage.

This has created the usual heat and not much light. Time magazine had an opinion by retired US Admiral Stavridis that makes a number of interesting statements. The first is that Putin more or less engineered this because the Mueller investigation is “coming to a head” (really?) and there was a need for the US to persuade its allies to take a firmer stand with Russia. (How does the second follow from the first?) Also the US should bolster Ukrainian defence, presumably to make Putin regret engineering this. Leave aside the bluster, notice anything? The Ukrainian ships had to enter the waters around the Kerch strait, so Ukraine controlled the timing. That makes it difficult for Putin to have engineered it. A further statement was that Russia needed to secure communications and control this Strait “to truly consolidate Crimea”. Needless to say, what is missing from this article is the fact that Russia has secured communication by building a bridge across the Strait. Access to the Sea of Azov requires passing under the bridge, which involves a relatively narrow piece of waterway. As an Admiral, he should know something about ship handling. Do you want two ships coming head-on into a very narrow choke-point? The Russians argue that anyone can pass through, but they must register the intention so that traffic control can be maintained. That seems reasonable to me. The Ukrainian sailors apparently have said they did not register, and they were ordered to ignore Russian controls. Form your own opinion, but it seems to me that Ukraine was deliberately trying to prod Russia. Why? Well, one theory is that Ukrainian elections are due in a few months, Poroshenko currently would be lucky to get 25% of the vote, so why not generate a foreign crisis? The significant point about this, for me, is the US position as stated by this Admiral: what is stated is at best half-truths, and the really important information is left out.

The second incident was that Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer of Huawei, has been arrested at Vancouver airport in order that she be extradited to the US to face unspecified crimes, but ones that probably relate to the fact that Huawei is selling telecommunications equipment to Iran. That is about all we know for sure, but apparently John Bolton knew this could occur in advance and presumably approved of it.

Going back a bit, a number of countries signed a deal with Iran that they would trade with it if Iran agreed not to proceed with the development of nuclear weapons. The US then pulled out of the deal, seemingly on the basis  that Trump believes that if when a deal has been struck, if he then pulls out at some future random time he can add more concessions to make a new deal more favourable to himself. Iran has refused Trump’s rhetoric, which is basically to side with Saudi Arabia against Iran. So the US imposed sanctions against Iran, and has stated it will sanction anyone else who deals with Iran. A number of other signatories did not impose sanctions when Iran has seemingly complied with the deal. The EU has stated that the EU will continue to trade with Iran as long as it maintains its part of the nuclear weapons deal. Thus the usual explanation for Meng’s arrest is that Huawei is breaking US sanctions by supplying to Iran. If this is so, does this not introduce a rather ugly precedent?

Thus we have the situation where if another country continues with a deal that the US joined, but then arbitrarily pulled out of, then the US requires the other countries to follow the US dictates, and if they do not, the US will arrest their citizens. That makes the president of the US almost able to dictate to the rest of the world.

Huawei is having a bad time, thanks to the US. A number of countries have been told by the US they should not implement Huawei 5G technology for undefined security reasons. As far as security goes, why does the US feel its technology is so secure? If it is secure, why are various politicians making continual assertions of election hacking? As it happens Huawei 5G technology appears to be more advanced than any US technology in telecommunications, and this has the ugly theme of if you can’t compete fairly, you will bully the opposition. This to me is the misuse of power. However, China is not really a country that will bow down to bullying. Apparently China had made concessions to Trump to buy more US exports before they knew about this arrest. What is the bet this won’t go ahead? But worse than that, by what right do you arrest a citizen of another country who is following the law of the country they live in just because (a) that country is in a spat with the US, and (b) the person was apparently in a transit lounge. A person cannot follow two contradictory laws, so why does the US think its Presidential edicts prevail everywhere?

Phlogiston – Early Science at Work

One of the earlier scientific concepts was phlogiston, and it is of interest to follow why this concept went wrong, if it did. One of the major problems for early theory was that nobody knew very much. Materials had properties, and these were referred to as principles, which tended to be viewed either as abstractions, or as physical but weightless entities. We would not have such difficulties, would we? Um, spacetime?? Anyway, they then observed that metals did something when heated in air:

M   + air +  heat        ÞM(calx) ±  ???  (A calx was what we call an oxide.)

They deduced there had to be a metallic principle that gives the metallic properties, such as ductility, lustre, malleability, etc., but they then noticed that gold refuses to make a calx, which suggested there was something else besides the metallic principle in metals. They also found that the calx was not a mixture, thus rust did not lead to iron being attached to a lodestone. This may seem obvious to us now, but conceptually this was significant. For example, if you mix blue and yellow paint, you get green and they cannot readily be unmixed, nevertheless it is a mixture. Chemical compounds are not mixtures, even though you might make them by mixing two materials. Even more important was the work by Paracelsus, the significance of which is generally overlooked. He noted there were a variety of metals, calces and salts, and he generalized that acid plus metal or acid plus metal calx gave salts, and each salt was specifically different, and depended only on the acid and metal used. He also recognized that what we call chemical compounds were individual entities, that could be, and should be, purified.

It was then that Georg Ernst Stahl introduced into chemistry the concept of phlogiston. It was well established that certain calces reacted with charcoal to produce metals (but some did not) and the calx was usually heavier than the metal. The theory was, the metal took something from the air, which made the calx heavier. This is where things became slightly misleading because burning zinc gave a calx that was lighter than the metal. For consistency, they asserted it should have gained but as evidence poured in that it had not, they put that evidence in a drawer and did not refer to it. Their belief that it should have was correct, and indeed it did, but this avoiding the “data you don’t like” leads to many problems, not the least of which include “inventing” reasons why observations do not fit the theory without taking the trouble to abandon the theory. This time they were right, but that only encourages the act. As to why there was the problem, zinc oxide is relatively volatile and would fume off, so they lost some of the material. Problems with experimental technique and equipment really led to a lot of difficulties, but who amongst us would do better, given what they had?

Stahl knew that various things combusted, so he proposed that flammable substances must contain a common principle, which he called phlogiston. Stahl then argued that metals forming calces was in principle the same as materials like carbon burning, which is correct. He then proposed that phlogiston was usually bound or trapped within solids such as metals and carbon, but in certain cases, could be removed. If so, it was taken up by a suitable air, but because the phlogiston wanted to get back to where it came from, it got as close as it could and took the air with it. It was the phlogiston trying to get back from where it came that held the new compound together. This offered a logical explanation for why the compound actually existed, and was a genuine strength of this theory. He then went wrong by arguing the more phlogiston, the more flammable the body, which is odd, because if he said some but not all such materials could release phlogiston, he might have thought that some might release it more easily than others. He also argued that carbon was particularly rich in phlogiston, which was why carbon turned calces into metals with heat. He also realized that respiration was essentially the same process, and fire or breathing releases phlogiston, to make phlogisticated air, and he also realized that plants absorbed such phlogiston, to make dephlogisticated air.

For those that know, this is all reasonable, but happens to be a strange mix of good and bad conclusions. The big problem for Stahl was he did not know that “air” was a mixture of gases. A lesson here is that very seldom does anyone single-handedly get everything right, and when they do, it is usually because everything covered can be reduced to a very few relationships for which numerical values can be attached, and at least some of these are known in advance. Stahl’s theory was interesting because it got chemistry going in a systemic way, but because we don’t believe in phlogiston, Stahl is essentially forgotten.

People have blind spots. Priestley also carried out Lavoisier’s experiment:  2HgO  + heat   ⇌   2Hg  + O2and found that mercury was lighter than the calx, so argued phlogiston was lighter than air. He knew there was a gas there, but the fact it must also have weight eluded him. Lavoisier’s explanation was that hot mercuric oxide decomposed to form metal and oxygen. This is clearly a simpler explanation. One of the most important points made by Lavoisier was that in combustion, the weight increase of the products exactly matched the loss of weight by the air, although there is some cause to wonder about the accuracy of his equipment to get “exactly”. Measuring the weight of a gas with a balance is not that easy. However, Lavoisier established the fact that matter is conserved, and that in chemical reactions, various species react according to equivalent weights. Actually, the conservation of mass was discovered much earlier by Mikhail Lomonosov, but because he was in Russia, nobody took any notice. The second assertion caused a lot of trouble because it is not true without a major correction to allow for valence. Lavoisier also disposed of the weightless substance phlogiston simply by ignoring the problem of what held compounds together. In some ways, particularly in the use of the analytical balance, Lavoisier advanced chemistry, but in disposing of phlogiston he significantly retarded chemistry.

So, looking back, did phlogiston have merit as a concept? Most certainly! The metal gives off a weightless substance that sticks to a particular gas can be replaced with the metal gives off an electron to form a cation, and the oxygen accepts the electron to form an anion. Opposite charges attract and try to bind together. This is, for the time, a fair description of the ionic bond. As for weightless, nobody at the time could determine the weight difference between a metal and a metal less one electron, if they could work out how to make it. Of course the next step is to say that the phlogiston is a discrete particle, and now valence falls into place and modern chemistry is around the corner. Part of the problem there was that nobody believed in atoms. Again, Lomonosov apparently did, but as I noted above, nobody took any notice of him. Of course, is it is far easier to see these things in retrospect. My guess is very few modern scientists, if stripped of their modern knowledge and put back in time would do any better. If you think you could, recall that Isaac Newton spent a lot of time trying to unravel chemistry and got nowhere. There are very few ever that are comparable to Newton.