The Power and the Money

What does the word “civilizational” mean in French?

There’s been a bit internet pile-on President Macron over the past few days. I dislike these things, on principle. The tweets that fill up my feed seem more designed to let the tweeter enjoy their own self-righteousness or special enlightenment than to express true outrage. It’s all rather unpleasant. I was sad to see the author of one of my favorite books join in.

What are they beating up the French president about? Well, his comment is here:

President Macron expresses doubt that aid will work without institutional reform, favors more aid and direct French involvement in security, praises growth in African nations, calls the continent “a land of opportunity,” and supports aid. Those comments do not seem to be the cause of the outrage.

One issue seems to be that the President misreported fertility rates. Only Niger has a total fertility rate above seven; for most of the continent, the number is around five. Perhaps I am too generous, but this seems like an entirely forgivable mistake.

A second issue is whether high fertility contributes to African poverty. A large literature on demographic dividends implies that yes, it does, at least on the margin. I do not see grounds to criticize the French president on that.

A third issue seems to be that he left out references to the negative impact of the European empires. This blog certainly has an interest in the subject. But Macron has been outspoken in his critiques of France’s imperial past. And in his quote he actually agrees with the idea of a Marshall Plan for Africa; he certainly is not dismissing the idea that Europe owes Africa a debt. I am, however, open to an argument that Françafrique imposes a rhetorical special burden on French presidents. (Does it?)

Which leaves us with his choice of the word “civilizational.” My friend Gabriel Mathy pointed out to me that Macron’s statement is the logical equivalent of calling Africans “uncivilized,” and that, I think most observers will agree, would have been offensive. Language, however, is not algebra: I have no idea of Macron’s odd word choice (to speakers of English or Spanish) has an offensive connotation in French.

At the end of the day, whether there is any basis for outrage hinges on that one word. If it has a racist connotation, like “Oriental,” then Macron deserves connotation. If it does not, then there seems to be nothing here, and I fail to understand the reasons for the pile-on.

And I do wish, sometimes, that the mockery and outrage would stop.

More on the Calexit bubble

The sudden spread of the “California secessionism” bubble shows how the Internet has weakened our political discourse for the worse. First, if a multi-millionaire had wanted to announce that he was funding a referendum in 1995, he would have had to have called a press conference. (He would likely have had to do that as late as 2005.) Calling a press conference is not hard, of course, but it meant that nobody besides his drinking buddies would have seized upon an offhand remark.

Calling a press conference isn’t hard, of course. But the need to do so meant that stupid ideas from rich people that wouldn’t survive the cold light of day couldn’t get out to the press. Now, though, it goes out to millions of potential viewers, and just as importantly (still!) the press.

The tweets that started the brouhaha are now down, I should add.

Second, the Russian press could have covered a fringe secession movement as much as it wanted, but the American press would never have picked up the story. Any Russian stories would have been noted as dubious and ignored. 

Poof, a non-story.

Now, this particularly story is not all that important. But it seems to me that it points out a worrying weakness in our national anti-bullshit immune system. Is there a corresponding gain or a way to combat the vulnerability?

It is hard to keep a detached attitude about the internet and politics

First, neo-Nazis organized by the internet booked a bunch of tables at an Italian restaurant around the corner from my house. They gave each other Hitler salutes, including, bizarrely, Tila Tequila. This upset the neighborhood, as you might imagine.

Then, yesterday, my wife found herself delayed while driving our kids back from a swimming pool by police called out because a man with a gun fired shots inside a pizzeria a few blocks away from our house and next to my favorite D.C. bookstore. The shooter had been inspired by a bizarre internet lie that Hillary Clinton had been running a child prostitution ring out of the place. 

That would be disturbing enough, but it seems that the national security adviser to-be believes the pizza-pedophile story, as does his son. (Links go to tweets by Gen. Michael Flynn and Michael Flynn, Jr. No hearsay.) 

This is not normal. This is certainly not normal from people close to the President-elect of the United States, or the President-elect himself. 

This morning, an email correspondent reminded me that in February 2010, in a post about potential failure modes for American political institutions, I had written the following: “The U.S. population might become apathetic and gullible to the point of civic dysfunction.” But I followed up with:

“That said, I see two problems, one potential and unlikely, one with us right now. The potential and (IMHO) unlikely one is that the internet and cable news will somehow interact with America’s ideological cleavages to produce a dysfunctional electorate. I really have my doubts that there is anything to worry about here, but I can of course be convinced otherwise by a good argument.” 

The 2016 election and its aftermath appears to be providing such a good argument. 

Quitting Facebook, now with science!

See, science! 

OK, the study suffered from some flaws, not least that anyone who signed up already had quitting on their mental radar screen. It would have been better to get a group for an experiment, then spring it on them what it was about. 

But still. Social media is bad. I know, some of you have met your spouses over social media, but you know that doesn’t really kill the argument, any more than the fact that my parents would not have absent the Spanish Civil War makes that conflict any better. 

Or maybe not, but after this election it is a little harder to be sanguine.

When ideology and self-interest meet, Ecuador edition

 The Correa administration admitted to cutting Wikileaks’ internet access over the recent releases of strategically-timed hacks from Podesta’s account. Good for them! They claim that the decision is a high-minded refusal to intervene in the internal affairs of another state, regardless of that state’s imperial record.

But it’s also in Ecuador’s interest. Not because a Clinton administration will be particularly good, of course. Rather, a Trump administration will be astoundingly bad. In immigration and trade, Ecuador may strategically close its market but it depends on the United States remaining open. And it very much depends on a structure of international law that bind investment disputes and prevent the U.S. from unabashedly exercising its power in the pursuit of commercial interest. (I wrote a whole book about that.) 

So good for President Correa, but this is a case where the decision is as much in the national interest as the right thing to do. 

An article that begs for historical fisking

On bad days, I really do think that modern communications technology really has ushered in something completely new. And maybe it will! But right now, this claim in The Atlantic that it the Internet has created a meaningless post-everything world, with pointless Harambe references divorced from the original context as proof, is just begging for a social historian to come along and demolish it.

Begging. Come on now. Go at it. I mean, the existence of Snake Plissken (or this movie) should be enough to show that post-everything meaninglessness is not exactly new, but I want to see a professional do this one. 

Coups, public opinion, and broadcasting

The best book on coups is Naunihal Singh’s Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. It answers many of the questions I had earlier about the attempted coup in Turkey. Singh is at the Air War College in Montgomery, where I am visiting. The below picture is neither from Montgomery nor recent.

The book is excellent. And it answers two questions raised in my last post. First, seizing the means of communication is key. This is not because they are key in-and-of-themselves, but because controlling them is key to convincing all actors that the coup will succeed. The putschists in Turkey failed abysmally at doing that, even before Erdogan used his smartphone to make a videocall. 

Second, popular opinion does not matter. In Singh’s words: “Public opinion has no effect on coup outcomes. Once a coup attempt begins, military actors rarely consider the reaction of civilians to the coup, and their decision to support or oppose the coup attempt had nothing to do with which side had more popular support. Statistically, coups were no less likely to succeed in countries with governments that could be assumed to have reasonably high levels of support (countries with high economic growth, democracies or one-party regimes) than the opposite.”

Here is a good review. 

Thoughts on Turkey

 Turkey is in the middle of an old-fashioned military coup, in the same league as the 2014 one in Thailand. This is not at all like recent events in our hemisphere. Honduras in 2009 was a complex and confusing situation where the constitution failed to contain political disputes. Paraguay in 2012 was only a coup in the fever dreams of the Brazilian government; the impeachment likely violated the spirit of the constitution, but it adhered to the letter. A coup may happen in Venezuela, but it will be a result of a complete collapse of order. We do not do things this way in this hemisphere.

With the kids in bed (they are tired!) I am watching television. I think there is an interesting question about whether Erdogan’s ability to get out messages via the Internet has made a difference as to how the coup has unfolded. There is a research project there ... coup leaders always moved to seize the television and radio stations back in the day, but do we know whether such seizures mattered? Is there data?

There is another interesting question about conscript militaries. It is clear that conscript militaries can pull of coups; it has happened all the time. But do we know whether conscript militaries decrease or increase the likelihood of a successful coup given other factors, like education or the legitimacy of democracy (the latter being hard to measure).

Worth studying.

Oh, and Turkey is not the only Muslim-majority nation in NATO. (Sorry Rachel!) I spent a lot of time in the other and blogged far less about it than I should have. Ni modo, I was tired at that time in my life.

Trump is still dangerous

 I may worry that the protestors may help Trump, but I do not worry about the protestors. They are acting in a long American tradition. I do worry about the possibility of President Trump. And more now.

I still think that Rafael Cruz would make a less dangerous President. Why? Read. 

ADDENDUM: It is clear that Melania Trump’s decision to lash out at the author is part of a deliberate strategy. The actual GQ profile of her is quite flattering, if not as much to her father. And the one putative error she called out was not, in fact, an error: the author wrote exactly what Ms. Trump said she should have written. I can only conclude that the Trump machine deliberately decided to call out the internet (and possibly real world) dogs as part of a strategy of intimidation against the press. And that is reprehensible. 

And scary, in that Trumpist interdogs are a thing. Could Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton call out the trolls, even if they wanted to?  

Timothy Lee is not making sense

 By now, you have seen the below photo and the assorted reactions on Twitter. (I refuse to write “Twitter reaction” or “internet freakout,” because neither Twitter nor the internet have volition.)

Timothy Lee at Vox then proceeded to write a silly article under a quite reasonable byline: “But the internet's collective freakout misses an important point: No matter how ridiculous it might look to us today, there’s every reason to think virtual reality is going to be a big deal in the next few years.”

The problem with Lee? The reactions on Twitter were not saying that VR is ridiculous and will thus never become common. They were saying that VR will very clearly become common ... and that portends a future that is in equal parts horrible and ridiculous.

And it is coming even if Will Baird is correct in the fascinating debate happening in comments over here ...

Last word on the bloody dress

 If I look at a picture of it backlit by sunlight, it looks white-and-gold. If I look at it under artificial light or sunlit from the front, it is clearly a washed-out blue-and-black.

I feel better at having the illusion be systematic. 

The goddamned dress, again

 Fine. I’m internet meming. Sue me.

Yesterday I said that the dress looked blue-and-black and then switched to white-and-gold within seconds, where it remained. I had the television on while I worked yesterday — I am a child of the second half of the 20th century, it helps me concentrate — and the dress still looked white-and-gold. In the afternoon I went down to the hotel gym. Of course, one of the televisions in the gym was showing the dress. (Along with a pair of llamas, the dress appears to be dominating the news across the English-speaking world. I was in a place that could be loosely-defined as English-speaking.) I glanced up ...

... and it looked blue-and-black.

It still looks blue-and-black. I can’t make myself see it as white-and-gold. Yet until late yesterday afternoon it was clearly white-and-gold.

Jesus. I am sure the reason is because I now know that it is blue-and-black, but why did it take half a day to have my brain’s visual center make the switch?

The f--king dress

 OK, here is what happened to me. I called up the picture, not knowing anything other than that it was some sort of trick question about the color of the dress. It looked blue-and-black at first and then in a manner of seconds turned white and gold. I stared at it waiting for it to change back, figuring that was the illusion. When it didn’t, I figured that I was immune.

Apparently not. What seems to have happened is that my brain registered the true colors but took a moment to adjust to what it thought the ambient light was like in the photo. At which point it settled on an interpretation that my conscious mind could not undo, even when I saw the truth.

I would be curious to re-run the experiment. If I had known that it was really blue and black, would I have seen that bizarre color shift a few seconds into my stare regardless?

Ah well. The metaphysics are perturbing, so I am going to go back to working on Ecuadorian finances now. Happy viral meme.

Cohorts v. cross-sections and you are not your grandparent

 So there is a report out that “Digital savviness peaks sometime between the ages of 14 and 15, and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age.”

Your alarm bells should immediately start going off. Do people just suddenly start forgetting how to push buttons (or yell at their machines) once they reach a certain age? Is using simple information technology a skill more akin to catching a fastball, in that if you don’t develop it by the time you’re a teenager you’ll never get good at it?

Probably not.

So that has to rank up there as a highly highly misleading sentence. Moreover, the tech-savviness that they’re measuring has to do the use of digital applications deliberately designed to be workable by a total idiot. Like, say, myself. It isn’t coding, or fixing a busted keyboard, or chip-design skillz what they’re measuring; it’s knowledge of Kik and Snapchat and Vine and all that.

My father, who really could be called digitally-savvy in that he not only used the for-morons applications like Skype but learned to program in his sixties, he would not have been amused by this article. 

Thumbs down from Lenny, may he rest in peace.

The internets are freedom-neutral

Not unexpectedly, the protests over the recent Mexican election (which will go nowhere) have led to bloviations about Twitter and Facebook and the blogosphere yadda yadda. My skepticism about the political effect of the Internet is well-known. Here I pointed out that the Egyptian government readily shut it down during the rebellion. Here I mentioned that revolutionary activity spread further and just as fast in the mid-nineteenth century. And here I presented evidence that most revolutionary mobilization in Egypt took place via ... printed leaflets.

So I was gratified when Mex Files (which you should all read regularly) published photographic evidence that angry young Mexicans agree with me.

“If I had known that you would be a cowardly Mexican, then I would’ve stuck to taking care of my cows. I didn’t have the Internet or Facebook, and I made a revolution. You, you’re too lazy to march for your rights. But hey, ‘Viva México,’ right?”

Right. I actually don’t think the recent Mexican election was fraudulent, and I still say right. The internet has made political mobilization easier — but only for those who were going to mobilize without it.

Positive campaigning is not all that it’s cracked up to be

 The 2006 presidential campaign in Mexico was especially nasty, with television ads claiming that AMLO was the second coming of Hugo Chávez and would destroy the country if elected. Mexico, however, lacks an equivalent of the First and Fourteenth amendments and, more importantly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of both. (Article 6 of the Mexican constitution guarantees freedom of speech, “unless it offends good morals, infringes the rights of others, incites to crime, or disturbs the public order.” Article 7 unconditionally guarantees the right to write and publish, but that is more specific than speech in general.)

The result of the election, then, was a 2007 law that prohibited negative campaigning. (Mr. López Obrador’s subsequent behavior, and whether that retroactively justified otherwise scurrilous ads, is not relevant to this discussion.) The result is an oddly anodyne bunch of ads. TV ads emphasize personality, as do the print ads from the three major parties. The PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, is also running on the Green Party ticket, however, and is using that platform to run a bunch of rather interesting issue statements:

My favorite is “Life sentences for kidnappers,” but I didn’t get a picture. Above you have a subway ad proclaiming “Pensions for all adult over age 65” and “Your place guaranteed in high school.” The latter is pretty much already true, and the former will be interesting without new tax revenue.

Below you have “No to fees in the public schools,” with a picture of an angry white man scolding a woman who only wants the best for her child:

And a related billboard proclaiming “No more fees in public schools: Truly free education.”

The end result is oddly populist to an American, but honestly no worse than the populist positive ads run by Republicans all the time. So what’s the problem? Two things.

First, the internet is unregulated. This is, I think, less of an issue than it sounds. In general, the internet is not a push medium, except for paid adverts, which are (or will be) regulated. Whispering campaigns are of course terrible, but I would need evidence to be persuaded that they are worse in the age of the internet: e.g., that they convince anyone who wasn’t already basically on-board.

Second, negative ads can convey real information. Patrick Corcoran argues this here. It makes sense that the truly scurrilous stuff will not convince a sophisticated electorate regardless of how it is disseminated, while real bad information may find it harder to be known. That said, I am not sure how this shakes out.

What I am sure of, however, is that the Green Party has no reason to exist other than as a subsidy-collecting machine, and is very far from Green. But that is a different issue.

This is your father’s revolution

 There seems to be some evidence that the Egyptian protests have been organized the old-fashioned way.

Thursday, January 27: Anonymous leaflets circulating in Cairo also provide practical and tactical advice for mass demonstrations, confronting riot police, and besieging and taking control of government offices. Signed “long live Egypt”, the slickly produced 26-page document calls on demonstrators to begin with peaceful protests, carrying roses but no banners, and march on official buildings while persuading policemen and soldiers to join their ranks.

The leaflet asks recipients to redistribute it by email and photocopy, but not to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter, which are being monitored by the security forces.

Charlie Stross suggested recently: “If I was in charge of organizing communications within a mass insurgency today, I would have an iron rule for comsec: With the exception of tools for real-time communication in the field during tactical engagements, no communication technology invented after 1945 may be used. Yes, microdots. Yes, dead letter drops. Yes, invisible ink made at the kitchen sink out of household ingredients. Yes, human couriers. Make the f--kers work to intercept our communications and hunt us down.”

It is still unclear to me that the internet had much effect on organizing the Egyptian revolt. It is fairly clear that it made it easier for the Iranian government to suppress the demonstrations in 2009. Malcolm Gladwell still stands.

Now, as far as validating a pet theory, conscription may be playing a key role in why the Egyptian army has not acted against the rioters ... or it may not. Thoughts?

Things happened before the Internet, really

 Enough, already! Now Steven Walt has joined the ranks of the people stunned by the effect of the internets. “A combination of modern mass media (Al Jazeera, the Internet, email, Twitter, etc.) has clearly played a major role in driving the pace of events.” I could handle this kind of thing from 20-somethings who don’t remember when you had to wait for a letter to arrive in the mail. But Steven Walt?

I am at a loss as to why people keep coming back to the Internets. Here is a chronology of recent events:

Dec. 17 - Mohamed Bouazizi sets fire to himself in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia.
Jan. 04 - Bouazizi dies of his burns. 
Jan. 14 - After days of riots, President Ben Ali flees to Saudi Arabia.
Jan. 22 - Protests in Algeria.
Jan. 23 - Protests in Yemen.
Jan. 25 - Protests in Cairo.

And here is an even more impressive and more rapid chain of events:

Feb. 22 - French government bans protest meetings. Riots break out.
Feb. 23 - Prime Minister Guizot resigns.
Feb. 26 - King flees to Britain.
Feb. 27 - Protest marches in Germany. Governments give into demands.
Mar. 13 - Riots flare in Vienna. Metternich resigns.
Mar. 15 - Mass demonstrations in Budapest.
Mar. 18 - Demonstrations in Berlin.
Mar. 20 - Uprising in Poland.
Mar. 31 - Constitution drafted for Germany.
Apr. 08 - Revolt in Moldava.

The difference? The first group happened in 2010-11, and the second in 1848. But somehow that has gone right into the memory hole. I am flabbergasted that the Brazilian, Philippine, and Chinese events of my living memory seem to have been forgotten. I am surprised that nobody seems to mention 1968. But I really stunned that 1848 has been lost in the frenzy to declare how super marvelicious the internet is for freedom.

I am making a strong argument here: if the internet had been magically shut down on December 17th, events would have proceeded in much the same way. News travels and people organize in ways that do not involve modern electronic communication.

And that is why Egypt’s internet shutdown is not having much effect. Except in surprising the more breathless techno-evangelists.

The internet is a series of tubes ... actual physical real-world tubes

 I hate internet triumphalism. The new communications technology of the last two decades is clearly changing society. Those changes are probably for the better. But the recent political upheaval has led to triumphalism of the worst sort, with all sorts of blather about Twitter revolutions and the like. It really drives me crazy, as if people have suddenly forgotten that spontaneous mass political mobilizations happened all the time back in the day. If the events in the links are too obscure, well, they are other, more famous ones. In short, there is no reason to believe that social networking or cell phones played any sort of irreplaceable role in the current unrest besetting Egypt and Yemen.

Moreover, the internet actually requires real-world infrastructure. Which governments can shut down. Through the expedient of making a phone call. The Egyptian government appears to have made just such a call. From the link:

We have examined the takedown event more closely, looking at the sequence in which Egyptian service providers removed themselves from the Internet. The following plot shows the number of available networks for each of the significant providers, between 22:00 and 23:00 UTC last night (midnight to 1am Cairo time). Our new observation is that this was not an instantaneous event on the front end; each service provider approached the task of shutting down its part of the Egyptian Internet separately.

 
Telecom Egypt (AS8452), the national incumbent, starts at 22:12:43.
Raya joins in a minute later, at 22:13:26.
Link Egypt (AS24863) begins 4 minutes later, at 22:17:10.
Etisalat Misr (AS32992) goes two minutes later, at 22:19:02
Internet Egypt (AS5536) goes six minutes later, at 22:25:10.

First impressions: this sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air. Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced.

The Egyptian government may fall. Or it may not. But it won’t be because of the Internet.

Random observations

 I don't do a lot of random observing on this blog. It may be time to start. So here are few. As always, comments and long involved arguments are desired.

(1) The internet and social networking are overrated. (I'm looking at you, Randy.) Way way overrated. Had computer technology been four decades more advanced, we would be pinning all the tumult of the sixties and seventies on the internet. Weather Underground, blame it on Facebook! Had it been six decades more advanced, we would have been bored. You know, like anyone surfing the net in the UAE can get bored. Click the link and tell me why I'm wrong. (That one goes to Charlie Stross. But how the hell did he manage to erase my post about meeting him in a bad bar in Boston?)

(2) Lay off my man from St. Lucia Saint Kitts! Alexander Hamilton is the hero of every muscular patriotic American pinko. He is why you can be a lefty Big Government type (with all respect to Alex Harrowell, I will have to disavow the term socialist, since it's become a curse word in my country) and still evoke the founding fathers. I will give props to libertarians (hey! Guy Tower! Why you don't read this, G?) but I will not let Dick Armey lie about the founding father of the nationalist American left.

(3) Basta with the Massa puns. (Scott? I haven't heard any from you, but I know you thinking 'em.) Seriously, people. Funny once. No more emails, please.

(4) You should all read more Alex Harrowell.

(5) I write this in Paris. Paris has a lot of white people. Really, the city is surprisingly chock full of 'em. But a major figure at a well-funded think tank says it ain't! Am I confused? So I looked up the figures. I was only able to find the 1999 results, which told me that 17.6% of the city's population was foreign born. Of those, 14% were Algerian-born, 13% from Portugal, 10% from Morocco, 6% from Tunisia, 4% from the madre patria, another 4% from the country that I often think really should be the madre patria, and 3% from Turkey. That comes to 54% of the foreign-born. Speaking as somebody who mistook the Moroccan fellow who drove him from the airport for an Eastern European and then asked his equally-Moroccan barber if he was from Italy, I leave any conclusions about Charles Murray's character (or my ability to identify accents in a foreign language) as an exercise for the reader. I do of course assume that Mr. Murray realized that people from Martinique, Guadaloupe, Guyana, Reunion, and (very soon) Mayotte are indeed as French as any blond German-speaking dude from Alsace.

(6) Man, there were a lot of cigarette butts in the gutter this morning when I took the metro in to the office. I ... like that.

I like France. I can't help it.

MMORG, son of Worf, or something

  I have never played an MMORG.  I think ... no, I know that I would have loved them when I was twelve, but all we had back then was Compuserve.  Thank God.  I am sort of glad that I became an adult and lost interest before the technology came of age.  These days, the only gaming I do is on an old Atari emulator.  Viva Missile Command!

My lack of experience may, in fact, be why I find this hysterical:

The webisodes are even funnier.  At least to somebody who has never actually played a MMORG, and probably never will.  YMMV, so reviews are desired!

A public service announcement that has nothing to do with Honduras

  This was one of the most useful signs I've ever spotted while driving along a rural highway.

“Watch what you put on the Internet.  Think before posting.”   

And I thought blogging might be a mistake?

  OK, everyone in America who hits the interwebs has probably heard about Senator Grassley's totally awesome imitation of Cher Horowitz by now.  But on the off chance that there is somebody out there reading this blog who hasn't, be you from elsewhere in the English-speaking world or beyond, click this link right now.  All indications are that this is not a hoax.

That is a U.S. Senator talking.  Yup.  Dude, is there a word for when something intended to be ironic turns out to be accurate?  Twitter, indeed.  I previously had no desire to try using it, let alone read the results:  now I have an active aversion.  Reverse marketing indeed, ironic in its lack of irony.

Somehow I seem to have found deep meaning in such gems as  “My carbon footprint is abt 25per cent of Al Gore. I'm greener than Al Gore. Is that enuf?” and “Comfort America worried abt hyperinflation Reafirm ACCORD of1951” or even “Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said 'time to delivr on healthcare' When you are a "hammer" u think evrything is NAIL I'm no NAIL.” 

Or ... well, click the link.

Department of WTF, once more

 These are not like things.  The data do not say what the people making the connection seem to think that they say.