Ukraine Is Winning The Propaganda War

One of the big things that strikes me about the current Ukraine war is how legacy media, especially in the US, has failed to cover it. There is neither an Edward R Murrow nor a Bernard Shaw in Kyiv. UK media has been somewhat better, but the best reports are from a combinationi of third-world outlets, independent YouTubers, and even the Ukraine government news agency. Ukraine in particular is running material without contradiction from the Russians:

Ukraine has paraded captured Russian soldiers in dozens of online videos as Moscow finally admitted its forces have sustained heavy losses after pictures showing bodies of Kremlin fighters emerged.

Footage posted online show tied up 'demoralised and exhausted' Russian prisoners of war captured after they failed to break through Ukrainian defences in Kyiv and Kharkiv over the weekend.

Several of the videos were posted on a Telegram channel set up on Saturday by Ukraine's Interior Ministry called 'Find Your Own'.

. . . Other footage purported to show Russian soldiers calling their families to tell them they had been captured but were safe and being 'treated fairly' by Ukrainian forces.

In one video the soldier, wearing military fatigues and a black hat, can be heard telling his mother that commanders had told troops they were 'going as peacekeepers to the territory of the (self-proclaimed) Donetsk People's Republic.'

'In fact, a war has broken out and we are here bombing cities,' he says, before telling his mother not to panic.

Another video posted on the Ukrainian Security Service's Facebook page shows a 21-year-old soldier from the snipers telling his captors he was part of military exercises along the border before the invasion.

'About two weeks later we were told to line up on the border, and then suddenly we crossed it in the night. There was no choice. If we had refused to go to war we would have been accused of treason.'

The first thing that strikes me is that this was a strategy used by the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War, to show public confessions by demoralized US prisoners. But while the US prisoners were "confessing" to improbable war crimes, the Russian prisoners in Ukraine are entirely credible and sympathetic. And there are enough of them to support Ukrainian claims of battlefield success.

The Ukrainian propaganda victory starts at the top:

Comedian Jon Stewart said that watching comedian-turned-Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky face down the Russian invasion of his country was a bit like “watching Shecky Greene” — a Las Vegas nightclub comedian in the 1950s and 1960s — “transform into Winston Churchill.”

Stewart, speaking with writers Robby Slowik and Rob Christensen during Friday’s episode of his podcast, “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” made the comparison after joking that comedians were often noted for their bravado — but not necessarily their actual bravery.

In a matter of a few days, Zelensky managed to turn the narrative around, effectively forcing the West to abandon its prior defeatism and support Ukraine. The situation is fluid, but there's cause for optimism.

It's A Wonderful Life And The Bank Run Theory

When I was in graduate school, I studied with professors who styled themselves Aristotelians, but in hindsight, they were just poseurs. When I became Catholic and began to look seriously at Aquinas, I began to understand how a real Aristotelian thinks, but at the same time, I realized that I actually began thinking as a real Aristotelian when I left graduate school and went into tech. A good Aristotelian looks for causes. One of the first bits of wisdom I picked up from my tech mentors was that in tech, things don't "just happen"; you can't say, "well, the program just crashed". The program crashed for a reason.

So I've been reflecting for days on Prime Minister Trudeau's reversal of his emergency declaration. It didn't "just happen". It happened for a reason. On Thursday, I listed several possible reasons, and a visitor has helped me sort through their likelihoid. Of potential opposition to the emergency declaration among either the Liberal caucus or the Canadian senate, the visitor said,

I agree that things did not LOOK good in the Senate debate, with the emphasis on the appearance. Only the Conservative members of the Canadian Senate are still members of the Conservative caucus. In 2014 Trudeau expelled all the Senators appointed by Liberal Prime Ministers from the Liberal caucus as part of his pledge to reform the Canadian Senate into a non-partisan body. Of course a majority of the Senate was still appointed by Liberals and only 16 are Conservatives, but the Conservative members were the ones who were speaking to the Emergencies Act legislation as the debate began. I think no one seriously expected it wouldn’t pass, but only after a lot of coverage of Conservative talking points. Since the protesters had been cleared from Ottawa by this point, probably seemed best to move on.

As for the House of Commons, of course any Liberal MP who voted against the bill would have been expelled from caucus; that’s how the parliamentary system works. Unless there is a so-called free vote, of which there have been perhaps half a dozen in the last seventy-five years, an MP must vote with his party or face being kicked out and having to sit as an independent. In this case the vote was viewed as one of confidence in the government, and if it had failed an election would have been triggered. This was the reason the NDP leader gave for supporting it. Mounties have denied that more than a few hundred names were released to banks; certainly not those of “Brianes” who donated $50.

I think that pretty much rules out the theories that involve loss of confidence in Trudeau by his caucus or the senate. The other theories I listed involve either opposition by financial interests to the need for them to police their customers, more specific concern about bank runs by customers worried that their accounts would be frozen, or beyond that, a more general groundswell of public opinion against the declaration. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive. The visitor raised two objections to the bank run theory or its variations:

Canada only has about 25 banks and five of them control 85% of all Canadian banking business. I think a “run on the banks” is a meaningless concept in the Canadian context.

, , , I was at the bank on Friday midday and all seemed normal. I note that the stock of all five of the Big Five banks was up on Friday, so if collapse is imminent it’s a closely guarded secret. I note that Mr Marazzo’s (former) bank has 12 million customers, close to the equivalent of a quarter of the population of Canada, and TD has 13 million, so even if every former Truck Convoy donor removed his or her money it would be a drop in the bucket.

There are two counters to these arguments. The first is what George Bailey outlines in the scene above from It's a Wonderrul Life: banks don't just have vaults full of cash. They make their money from loans on which they charge interest. The loans are funded by deposits. The vast majority of the deposits are paid right out again to borrowers. Their cash on hand is kept to a minimun specified by bank regulators. To say that Wampus Bank has $38 trillion in assets (or whatever) says nothing about its cash on hand, and if a relatively small number of people suddenly cash out their accounts such that the bank's cash reserves are threatened, that could lead to insolvency no matter how big the bank.

The other great Hollywood film about bank runs is The Big Short, which is about how several groups of contrarian analysts discover and profit massively from the causes of the 2008 US banking crisis. This is proof if no orher that banks fail no matter how big they are. In one delicious scene, a Standard and Poor's analyst haughtily defends her deliberate blindness to the actual crisis in the US banking industry by insisting that even the contrarians are hypocrites, since they have bosses like she does, and they're all part of the same game.

The game, which I think both George Bailey and the Big Short contrarians would agree, is credit. The word is based on the Latin credo, "I believe". In turn, we have concepts like credibility. Commerce is based on an overall trust in the players' credibility. Just because you may walk into your bank on Friday morning and see everything looking normal isn't necessarily a guarantee that it is. That's certainly one of the subtexts of The Big Short. Indeed, if bank stocks were up that particular day, it could just as well reflect they'd been down earlier but had recovered, due possibly to investor concern about the overall credibility of the banking system if it began to seem like it was arbitrarily freezing accounts without due process.

In that case, even prior to anything like an actual, or just a significant, run on Canadian banks, this could certainly make Canadian bankers nervous. Certainly US banks suddenly became very sensitive to accusations that they were gouging on overdraft fees via practices like delaying overdraft notices to customers until multiple overdrafts, generating multiple overdraft fees, could be charged. Once the bankers realized this gave their industry a bad name, they dropped the practice quickly.

Naturally, Trudeau could have reversed course on the emergency declaration for actual reasons we may never learn. On the other hand, accusations of bank overreaction and arbitrary freezing of accounts were prominent after the emergency declaration, and given the banks' motivation to avoid controversy, they may well have deemed it prudent to head off any possible public panic by urging Trudeau at least to take them out of the process. The fact that a number of Canadian banks then felt the need quickly to correct the public record in their cases supports this view as well.

"Full Tonto"

Amid the generally awful Ukraine coverage yesterday, I discovered a new expression:

Russia's foreign ministry said on Friday it was surprised by a remark by UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed that President Vladimir Putin had gone "full tonto".

"It is surprising that the British defence minister gives such assessments of the head of another state," Maria Zakharova, the ministry's spokesperson, told a briefing.

Sure enough, the Urban Dictionary provides this definition (I assume the Russian foreign ministry had to look this up as well):

Gone full tonto

taken lunacy to a new level

You've gone full tonto there, Simon

There's also just Tonto:

Tonto

When someone completely loses the plot and goes mental at you for no reason. The word can be used in both funny and serious situations.

Teachers, partners and mothers are most likely to be described as going "tonto".

Person 1: "You coming out tonight?"

Person 2: "Sorry can't my mum's gone absolutely tonto for no reason and she's lost the plot."

The context this definition provides is illuminating -- it normally applies to mothers and teachers, especially in crazy-tyrant mode. But here we have the UK defense minister applying it officially to a head of state, with an implication of belittlement and ridicule. I get the impression that the Russian foreign minstry looked this one up too and was not amused. But then I followed the link to the plot:

The plot

The destination or proper action for the outing

What’s the plot tonight??

More widely reported is this exchange between US officials and Ukraine President Zelensky:

Zelensky has reportedly refused to be evacuated from the capital city of Kyiv as Russian military forces attack the city and surrounding areas.

“The U.S. government is prepared to help Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky leave Kyiv to avoid being captured or killed by advancing Russian forces, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials,” The Washington Post reported. “But so far, the president has refused to go.”

A senior American intelligence official with direct knowledge of the conversation that U.S. officials had with Zelensky when he was reportedly asked to evacuate says that Zelensky responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

The situation is fluid, but the one certain thing is that circumstances aren't turning out as respectable opinion had predicted. Or maybe more succintly, they've all lost the plot.

“No One Expected Sanctions Would Prevent Anything”

Among the revealing data points in yesterday's news was President Brandon's remark to the press, “no one expected sanctions would prevent anything.” The story at the link asks the obvious questions:

Huh, what? Then what has the Biden team been talking about, by threatening sanctions over the past month? If they thought that, why have they just been talking about sanctions?

Why did Kamala Harris claim that the sanctions would deter Putin?

Biden also tripped over White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who said the same thing.

. . . Biden’s statement was such a stunning lie and flip-flop on what his team had been saying that even CBS News’ Margaret Brennan called it out.

“I thought that was so interesting when President Biden said, ‘No one expected sanctions to prevent anything, Brennan said. “Actually, that’s exactly what his foreign policy team said again and again, and it’s what his secretary of state said to me on Sunday.”

My own view is that the remark is completely consistent with the real Joe Biden: he believes, as I've noted (for instance here) , that he's "a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations." As a true crime fan, it reminds me of confessions by hardened psychopaths outlining heinous torture-murders in utterly matter-of-fact tones -- of course I did it that way. That's how I operate.

So in my view, this wasn't just a slip, a misspeak, or even a casual falsehood. For good or ill, he was outlining his actual agenda. It appears that his intent was to permit an elaborate kabuki for months, leading up to a Russian invasion of Ukraine that would be just as inevitable as the bungled evacuation of Afghanistan. Of course it was going to happen. That's how world leaders operate. Don't be so naive.

Let's look at other data points in yesterday's news. Take Secretary Blinken's remarks:

On Thursday’s broadcast of “CBS Evening News,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken responded to a question on whether the United States will cut off purchases of oil and gas from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine by stating that we’re trying to ensure “that we inflict maximum pain on Russia” while at the same time, “minimizing any of the pain to us.”

Host Norah O’Donnell asked, “Russia’s economy’s fueled by gas, and the U.S. is a consumer. So, would the U.S. consider cutting off oil and gas purchases from Russia?”

Blinken responded, “Well, what we’re doing, Norah, across the board, is making sure that we inflict maximum pain on Russia for what President Putin has done, while minimizing any of the pain to us.”

He also stated, “We’re in full coordination with other countries, both consumers and producers alike, to minimize any impact that this may have on energy prices and on gasoline.”

According to CNN,

President Joe Biden, facing the risk of a destabilizing energy price shock, is promising to blunt the impact of rising energy prices on American families. But that won't be easy.

The Russia-Ukraine crisis has already helped lift oil and gasoline prices to levels unseen since 2014. Further sanctions on Moscow could drive pump prices closer to $4 a gallon. Biden is bracing the public for just that, acknowledging on Tuesday that "defending freedom will have costs."

. . . There's a long history of voters blaming presidents for high gas prices -- fair or not. Yet presidents have limited power to drive down energy prices, as Biden himself has learned painfully in recent months.

So this sounds like it'll be another months-long charade from Biden and his handlers: they'll make a show of trying to lower fuel prices, but they'll go up anyhow as the Russians profit from their continued rise. And at a certain point, President Brandon will blurt, "Of course I knew I couldn't do anything about gas prices. That's how world leaders operate."

It's almost as though the guy was colluding with Putin to put on a noisy chorus of complaint about his invasion of Ukraine while welcoming an excuse to raise gas prices behind the scenes. Why would he do this? Well, for one thing, Zelensky fired Hunter from Burisma. For another, high fuel prices are a key part of the Democrat agenda. Look at John Kerry's remarks from yesterday:

Republicans have torn into 'despicable' former Secretary of State John Kerry for saying he hopes Vladimir Putin will still help fight climate change just before Russian fighter jets, troops and tanks rolled into Ukraine in an all-out invasion.

President Biden's climate envoy said frozen Russian land is 'thawing', Putin's 'infrastructure' is 'at risk' and urged the Russian tyrant to 'help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.

Well, the best thing Putin can do for the climate is make sure fuel prices rise, and he's certainly up to doing that. And whoever gets burned or maimed or blown up many time zones distant will be collateral damage (and they had it coming for firing Hunter anyhow). There's a strange detachment among all the key people here. Never let a crisis go to waste.

The US truckers are on their way. One of their key grievances is the rising price of fuel. And this has been under Biden's control from, the start. As Texas Gov Abbot put it,

Biden's closure of pipelines because of shutting down leases and things like that, the ability to drill, that's one thing that's caused the price of gasoline to go up so much because the price of oil is going up so much. Biden knew when he was getting into this situation with regard to Russia and the Ukraine, he knew that the price of oil would be going up even more. And so everybody watching this show, the price they're going to be a paying at the pump will be going up even more in the coming days. If Biden would rely on American-based energy, we could solve that problem.

Working class protests are powerful things. Especially after Canada, people are paying attention as the US convoy nears Washington.

Trudeau Revokes Emergency

So it's known that Prime Minister Trudeau has revoked his declaration of emergency, only a couple of days afer he and other officials strongly implied it would last at least 30 days. The most detailed explanation of the legal background and implications of the declaration I've seen is in the link above.

I've seen little other intelligent commentary, especially for the reasons behind the reversal. The explanations I've seen include:

• The state of emergency needed to be approved by the Canadian senate. Debate there was underway, and it didn't look good. The declration was withdrawn yesterday before the senate voted, and the senate canceled debate without a vote.
• Canadian banks and financial institutions may have been pleading behind scenes not to be put in a position of policing their clients.
• The Mounties were arbitrarily telling Canadian banks to freeze accounts, in at least some cases of people who had donated token amounts to the truckers without being physically present at any protest. This was possibly causing runs on banks -- earlier on Wednesday, it was announced that the Mounties were now "unfreezing" accounts, apparently in response to these reports.
• Some Liberal Party MPs were apparently forced to vote in favor of the declaratrion on February 14 on penalty of being expelled from caucus, but several are known to be skeptical that the declaration was needed.
• Trudeau and the cabinet may have underestimated public opposition to the declaration, especially in the wake of overreaction by Mounties and police in Ottawa, recorded in viral videos, as well as reports of arbitrary freezing of accounts. I have the impression that the situation was quickly changing, and I would speculate that Canadian senators were feeling the heat of constituent concern that the House of Commons hadn't felt the week before.

One thing that isn't completely clear is the status of those already arrested for offenses or who had their trucks confiscated during the ten days of the emergency declaration, and whether investigations of other individuals for activites before or during the declaration will continue. As of Wednesday,

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) announced on Wednesday that it has started an internal investigation over allegations that some OPP officers may have donated to the fundraiser for the anti-Wuhan coronavirus restriction Freedom Convoy protests.

The officers were allegedly identified as part of a leak of hacked fundraiser data from the crowdfunding website GiveSendGo by the left-leaning Toronto Star newspaper published this week.

OPP spokesperson Bill Dickson stated that the OPP was aware of the allegations and told broadcaster CBC that officers “appear to have made donations that have gone toward the unlawful protest in Ottawa.”

“The matter has been brought to the attention of OPP Command, and the OPP Professional Standards Unit has launched an internal conduct investigation into this matter,” Dickson told the CBC in an email.

In another case,

The director of communications in the Ontario ministry responsible for enforcing the law is out of a job after she was tied to a $100 donation supporting the convoy blockading Ottawa streets.

Marion Isabeau-Ringuette is among several government staffers and associates under scrutiny after their names or identifying information were found in a pair of leaks of some 100,000 donations to American crowdfunding website GiveSendGo.

“For the communications director to be financially supporting an unlawful, illegal occupation is definitely concerning,” said NDP MPP Catherine Fife.

In the US, this individual would have quite the basis for both a wrongful termination suit and a defamation suit.

The impression I have is that the overreaction to the Ottawa protest and the emergency declaration have caused considerable damage to Canadian expectations that their institutions will protect their basic legal rights, that their police, especially the Mounties, behave professionally, and that the financial system can be trusted to handle their money. At least the Mounties are aware of the problem:

The RCMP is aware of the material circulating on social media pertaining to a chat group that includes some of its members, and we can confirm that we are looking into the matter. This material is not representative of those who have committed themselves to serving Canadians with integrity and professionalism.

. . . All members of the RCMP know that, whether on or off duty, they have a responsibility to hold themselves to the highest professional standards and are subject to the Code of Conduct of the RCMP at all times. This includes acting with integrity, fairness, and impartiality, and avoiding any potential conflicts between their professional responsibilities and private interests.

I don't think this is over.

Meanwhile, US truckers, inspired by the Canadian example, are on their way to Washington.

The Freedom Truckers, Solidarność, And The Underground Railroad

I've noticed complaints, not just from Prime Minister Trudeau but from other Canadians, that the Freedom Truckers have been partly funded by US donations. The first observation I would make is that, at least until the Canadian emergency declaration, there was nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral per se in making such a donation on either side of the border. There is no indication that any appeals for trucker funds were fraudulent.

The second observation I would make is that even before Canada became what is now constituted as Canada, there has been a friendly-adversarial relationship between the neighbors over human rights issues. Before the US Civil War, that territory was the most practical destination of the US Underground Railroad, which was an abolitionist network that facilitated the movement of escaped slaves to areas where they would be safe from recapture. However, even northern non-slave states in the US were required to return escaped slaves to their southern owners if they were caught. Canada wasn't under this obligation.

It appears that Canadians welcomed them, in part because the British had been quicker to abolish slavery. Followers of The Curse of Oak Island show recognize the case of Samuel Ball, an escaped slave from South Carolina who earned his freedom by fighting on the side of the British during the Revolution. Given the ambiguity of his situation in the US after 1783, he relocated to Nova Scotia, where he was welcomed and became a prosperous landowner.

During the Viet Nam War, Canada assisted US citizens who wished to escape conscription by making it easy for them to achieve landed immigrant status. I've got to assume this is also some source of pride for many Canadians, who must see themselves in such cases as a "true north" in the face of US injustices, and eventually the US issued an amnesty for US citizens who'd fled to Canada to avoid the draft. But it seems to me that these things can go both ways.

COVID lockdowns and other restrictive measures like curfews, limiting worship and other assembly, and limiting otherwise lawful business activity, are restrictions on human rights. Certainly in comparison to genocide, mass incarceration, wholesale confiscations of wealth and the like, they're milder, but they are in fact human rights abuses that can be justified only when the consequences of not violating such rights are worse. The record of the COVID panic has been that the restrictions have often been ineffective in stopping the disease at all and have had destructive side effects themselves, and even at best, the benefits of measures like vaccine mandates have been uncerain.

Efforts to negotiate even minimal relaxation of COVID restrictions, even in the face of clear evidence of their ineffectiveness, have been dificult in many countries, including Canada. Things have been worse in Australia and New Zealand, but those places aren't immediate US neighbors. There's a certain amount of good will between Americans and Canadians, especially at the people-to-people level involving the plebs, though not the elites. Americans and Canadians sympathize with people like truckers on both sides of the border. To claim that American truckers are just as subject to US border controls as Canadians, making American sympathies for Canadians somehow misguided, is to neglect the fact that the workers on both sides want both sets of controls, which have little medical justification, ameliorated or removed entirely.

This goes to another factor driving American sympathies: Americans and Canadians drive the same cars, eat the same food (with only a few exceptions), drink the same soda and beer, wear the same clothes. On the American side, COVID restrictions have been eased because states like Florida and Texas have been able to prove that things have turned out about the same with or without masks, social distance, or vaccines, which has made it easier for residents of other states to demand equivalent relaxations.

In Canada, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, no equivalent relaxations took place until the Freedom Convoy began its protests, at which point five provinces promptly did schedule some limited lifting. At the same time, US controls do continue in various states, often inconsistently enforced, medically unnecessary, and at best annoying. The Freedom Convoy has had greater effect on US politicians than in Canada in encouraging continued relaxations, which from a US perspective is reason enough to have helped out with it -- again, via channels that in the US remain completely legal, moral, and ethical, and were the same in Canada until the emergency was declared.

But the fact remains that COVID controls of any sort are now completely political. The Super Bowl, held in Los Angeles County under one of the few remaining US outdoor masking regimes, occurred with the masking rule entirely unenforced and largely flouted, with no observable impact on the disease. The Ottawa protest, which a year ago would have been denounced as a superspreader event, appears to have resulted in no noticeable outbreak. There was no serious condemnation of protesters as dangerous spreaders of infection; they are now guilty only of hooliganism, er, mischief.

US truckers now appear to be gearing up for their own convoy. Their goal, which I think is entirely appropriate, is to further efforts at completely eradicating the human rights abuse of COVID controls, which are largely unabated at the federal level in both the US and Canada.

The last case I would cite is US (and indeed Vatican) support for the Solidarity movement in Poland. I don't know what foreign money went to support this in what proportion, although CIA money was certainly involved, with Vatican money quite possibly in concert with the CIA; I would also imagine that Polish-Americans and other US private groups sent money as well. It was in opposition to human rights abuses. It was well, legally, ethically, and morally spent, whatever the objections from the Warsaw regime, just as much so as the money going from the US to Canadian truckers.

It Isn't Trudeau

Justin Trudeau has had a lot of vilification lately, especially from the US side, as a tyrant and a dictator. I think he's a lightweight, but nowhere even near, say, Evita Perón, which is to say that as dictators go, he's AAA baseball.. It's not clear at all for now exactly what the state of emergency he's imposed on Canada entitles him to do, except that it's said the emergency can't override Canadian charter rights, which themselves are pretty vague. For instance,

In April 1982, Canada entrenched in its constitution a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 7 of this new document provides that "everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice". The Canadian Bill of Rights (1960), and the British and American constitutions, safeguarded those fundamental rights through the phrase "due process of law" instead of "principles of fundamental justice".

As interpreted in US jurisprudence, "due process of law' implies

When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due process violation, which offends the rule of law.

What we're seeing in Canada following the declaration of emergency is truckers having their trucks seized and bank accounts frozen without a charge and without a trial. The mayor of Ottawa is currently saying the trucks will be sold. As far as anyone can tell, no relevant legislature has ever passed a law against what the truckers did specifying such penalties. In the US, this would definitely be a due process violation; in Canada, this is much less certain.

Someone at some point will presumably argue that seizing the truckers' means of livelihood without a charge or a trial violates "principles of fundamental justice", but listening to Trudeau himself in Parliament yesterday suggests he, or indeed a Canadian judge, will simply argue that Canada has always been founded on principles of fundamental justice, and it's precisely the un-Canadian behavior of the truckers that's put them in their pickle. Learn to code, guys. In fact, learn to code in the US.

At the start of the US rebellion against the UK, Canada as it was constituted at the time was offered to chance to join, and it chose not to. Different place. Always has been. For that matter, the Laginas are finding this out on Oak Island in a very different context. I would not go to Canada except to pass through quickly on the way to Alaska.

But there's a bigger issue here. What's happening now in Canada is just a special case of the COVID moral panic in its late, or "morning after" phase. US, and indeed at least some European, institutions have shown more resilience, especially in the end phase of the panic. The truckers' protests have had far more impact on US mayors, legislators, and governors than they have in Canada itself. But the truckers' protests are just a special case of a general recovery of sanity in the world population, and they came even as some Canadian provinces belatedly realized it was time to loosen up.

The COVID crisis worldwide was interpreted by the ruling elites as a delicious opportunity to suspend constitutionial protections everywhere. I thought when this all got started that it would be a long legal and political process to claw them back. But a big factor that drove the original moral panic was also Donald Trump. It's intriguing that so late in the process, Prime Minister Trudeau is blaming Trump, Trumpists, and "foreign" money for the truckers. He's a bit late to that particular game. Whatever Trump's own future may be, that genie is out of the bottle -- it's just that Trudeau still needs to get used to it.

Trump has been gone for more than a year. The COVID panic is winding down. There's a distinct fin de siècle quality to the ongoing Canadian drama. But it isn't really Trudeau's fault or his doing.

How Is The Putative Ukraine Crisis Not A Boondoggle?

Boondoggle has multiple meanings, but this one from the Urban Dictionary actually seems applicable to the current moment: there's some sort of diplomatic party going on in Munich, to which President Biden has dispatched Vice President Harris, who as far as anyone can tell is incapable of doing anything but relaxing/fun stuff other than work. Yesterday she made the following remarks at the Westin Grand Munich to illustrate that:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, this was an important trip to be here at the Munich Security Conference — in particular this year, as I said yesterday.

We are looking at a moment that is a very decisive moment on one of the bases for the Munich Security Conference and certainly one of the founding reasons for NATO, which is European security and the connection and alliance between Europe and the United States.

This was a productive trip, in terms of the extensive bilateral meetings that we had that were in furtherance of the ongoing collaboration and partnership with our Allies.

It was important in that, as you all know, this is a moment that is very dynamic. If not every hour, certainly every day, there seem to be new moments of interest and also of intelligence.

Why just yesterday afternoon, the defense minister made a most illuminating Power Point presentation! Seriously, against what we're being told is a background of tanks almost rolling into Kyiv, this is the relative urgency with which our officials are actually treating the situation. New moments of interest indeed. Over the weekend I ran into this gaseous think piece in The Atlantic, Putin Has Made America Great Again:

The story of the Ukraine crisis so far has been about many things: blackmail; realpolitik; appeasement; even, apparently, Western provocation regardless of the facts. But, here in Europe, the one thing it very much has not been about is American decline. In fact, from here, the story of this latest crisis is of the reestablishment of America the Good, America the Bold, America the Supreme—and, by extension, Europe the Weak.

, , , While America itself continues to struggle with its own sense of decline, its dominions in Europe are choosing to suspend their disbelief in the imperium all over again. After years of grumbling about American power, it took only the whiff of a threat from Moscow for Europe to recommit to the old order, thrusting the battered old fasces of imperial authority back into the hands of the emperor in Washington.

Why, they all got together in breakout sessions at the Westin Grand Munich to celebrate that very development! But hundreds of words farther down, we get to the real point:

In his inaugural address, Biden’s message to the world was that America had been tested, but had come back stronger as a result. The country would, he said, “lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” America, he was saying, was ready to resume its role as leader of the free world, a “trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

Rereading these lines today, in light of the Ukraine crisis, you can conclude that he has partly made good on his promise, despite the debacle in Afghanistan. He has shepherded the West into a unified position on Ukraine through careful and conciliatory diplomacy. Yet Russia’s challenge to the West today, as it amasses its troops on Ukraine’s borders, is predicated on its belief that American power is retreating, and with it the power of its example. Europe’s response, however, has been to reveal how powerful America remains.

Sleepy Joe? I don't see it. President Brandon at long last elected not to spend the holiday weekend in Delaware, instead waiting anxiously in the White House for Kamala Harris's latest tidbits of interest and intelligence, or so it would seem. The puzzling thing is that the US appears to be trying to inflame the situation:

The Washington Post obtained a copy of a letter sent from U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Bathsheba Nell Crocker to Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights. The letter warned that the U.S. has “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the report, calling it “absolute fiction” and saying during a call with reporters: “Do you realize that this is an absolute canard, a lie? It is absolute fiction. There is no such list. It’s a fake.”

Crocker, however, wrote in her letter that the U.S. is convinced Russia would “likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons.”

The letter also warns that Russia would commit “human rights violations and abuses” and would use extreme force against protesters.

The inclusion of the US political buzzword "LGBTQI+" suggests this is entirely for US domestic consumption. If they're so concerned about human rights abuses, why not complain about Trudeau, Ottawa, and the Mounties, who actually did commit abuses over the weekend, rather than Russia, who just might in the future? But Ambasador Bathsheba Nell Crocker is echoed by National Security Handler Jake Sullivan just this morning:

“We believe that any military operation of the size, scope and magnitude of what we believe the Russians are planning will be extremely violent,” Sullivan outlined. “It will cost the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and military personnel alike.”

“But we also have intelligence to suggest that there will be an even greater form of brutality because this will not simply be some conventional war between two armies,” he continued. “It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them, and that is what we laid out in detail for the [United Nations] because we believe that the world must mobilize to counter this kind of Russian aggression should those tanks roll across the border, as we anticipate they very well may do in the coming hours or days.”

Again, he's writing Tom Clancy thrillers about imaginary wars, and he's been doing it for weeks. Each time he does it, he sheds a little more credibility, and if Putin does invade at some point down the road, people will have minimized the possibility because Sullivan's predictions failed to come true, time after time. But I'm increasingly convinced the administration is stirring up an imaginary crisis for domestic consumption.

But Where's the Ukraine War?

Today is February 20, which is one of the dates National Security Handler Jake Sullivan proposed as a perhaps-as-early-as for Russian tanks to appear in the streets of Kyiv. The logic here appears to have been that the Olympics would seize the world's attention, giving Putin the opening to invade while everyone was distracted. The problem was that the Olympics turned out to be the most boring and uneventful in history, and they provided no distraction. They weren't even worth a yawn.

The distraction throughout this period has been in Canada. I'll get to that, but let's get to the more imnmediate problem of bad looks. Russian tanks in the streets of European capitals are a bad look. Always have been. Let's face it, they would immediately drown out figure skaters, no matter how good the figure skaters. The guy who's figured this out is Vladimir Putin, who in fact seems to be a world leader who learned something from the 20th century. I get the sense that he, if anyone, understands that if he can get what he wants without tanks in the streets, he'll do it. My take is that so far, he's succeeding.

In fact, he's doing so well that he's making President Biden look hysterical. Biden's been predicting tanks in the streets any day now since late last year, and his predictions keep not coming true. A growing part of the problm is that Biden's been reassuring us that his predictions are based on our intelligence:

“We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week ... in the coming days,” Biden said, citing the “significant intelligence capability” of the United States.

These remarks were from Friday, as today's deadline of February 20 edged ever closer without tanks in the streets. It's getting more and more like the guys who predict the end of the world and have to keep moving the date forward, with lamer and lamer excuses each time. I'm not sasying this won't eventually happen, but if it does, it's going to be on Putin's schedule, not Biden's, and for the foreseeable future, it looks like Putin will get what he wants without a direct invasion.

Indeed, if Putin appears to have learned a thing or two from 20th century history class, Biden and US intelligence have not -- consider what they failed to predict, from Pearl Harbor to the Chinese intervention in Korea to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact to Al-Qaida. They aren't much good at all, something Truman and Reagan at least understood. No coincidence that they helped write 20th century history.

So let's move to Canada. It sounds like Prime Minister Trudeau skipped 20th century history class the day they covered how police running down peaceful demonstrators -- with horses, dogs, fire hoses, clubs, gas, whatever -- isn't a good look. You don't even need to shoot them, although Kent Sate teaches that's a bad look, too. There are far too many examples, St Petersburg 1905, Birmingham 1963, Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970, Tienanmen 1989, and so forth -- that there was an awful lot for Trudeau to ignore. And it seems to me that the lesson has been the same every time, the demonstrators are playing a long game, and as the victors, they eventually get to write the history. A few cracked heads, a few dog bites, a few put in jail for hooliganism or whatever, a few knocked down, even a few, or more than a few, shot dead -- they eventually come out on top.

I hate to say this, but the guy who paid attention in 20th century history class is Putin.

Not A Good Look

The puzzling thing to me is how quickly US civil authorities are backing off their COVID mandates even as Trudeau insists mandates even stricter than those in the US are non-negotiable, now to be enforced by horses running down the workers in the streets of the capital.

And US and Canadian COVID trends are just about identical:

US politicians are scrambling to announce they're "following the science", while Trudeau -- not even in step with his own provincial premiers -- is keeping the controls on by ukase. I don't know where this is going to end up, but it looks like we in the US owe the Canadian truckers a great deal. Events in Windsor and Ottawa have clearly concentrated US minds most wonderfully.

What's The New Narrative?

I saw a headline on one of the aggregators this morning: "NYT wonders: Is Putin still rational after two years of pandemic isolation?"

It’s one thing to use the madman theory of foreign relations as leverage. It’s quite another to actually have an insane man in charge of a very large, modern military. For years, people have operated on the assumption that Vladimir Putin acted on a coldly rational basis, and based on his pre-pandemic track record, that assumption not only proved safe but accurate.

As far as I can see, Putin's strategy in Ukraine has been in place since 2014, when he effectively seized Donbas and Crimea from Ukraine via separatist proxies. As Tucker Carlson put it,

But if there’s one thing you absolutely must know about Russia, if you’re going to navigate this world, that thing is that on February 16, 2022, Vladimir Putin is going to invade our closest ally in the world, Ukraine. So write that down — February 16, 2022, Ukraine invasion begins. That’s the day.

Joe Biden has been very clear about that, so were the Intel agencies and of course, their stenographers in the news media. As Politico put it, quote, “Russia will start a physical assault on Ukraine as soon as February 16, multiple U.S. officials confirmed.” A physical assault.

The Ukrainian state media outlet Ukrinform, however, offered an opinion from the scene:

Russia has been waging war against Ukraine for eight years already. These are the eight years of daily reports of deadly shelling, IDPs, and casualties among our military and civilians.

So, my first questiom is why anyone at the New York Times thinks COVID changed anything if Putin actually made his Ukraine move almost six years before anyone had even heard of COVID. A second question would be whether anyone, even at the New York Times, thinks any world leader has been locked down like ordinary people have been, such that it would make him crazy. Heck, Biden is the one who stays locked own.

President Biden, meanwhile,, is still giving the same message:

President Joe Biden warned Thursday morning a Russian attack on Ukraine could begin in the coming days, casting a new incursion into the country as all but certain and warning Moscow could stage events in the lead-up to generate a pretext for war.

. . . Pressed on whether he believes an attack will happen -- and when -- Biden said: "Yes. My sense is it will happen in the next several days."

So does he have a new invasion date? I've got to conclude that so far, Biden is looking ridiculous. Meanwhile, Putin has risked nothing, and he's lost nothing. He's effectively reinforced the status quo in Donbas and Crimea, someting Ukraine acknowledges. How is he insane?

The existing narrative isn't working. Someone needs to come up with a new one -- even if we accept that Putin is crazy, it simply means Biden is being jerked around by a crazy guy. Actually, for that matter, it's too bad neither Biden nor Speaker Pelosi got the name of Putin's plastic surgeon.

How Bad Are Things In Canada?

This story that I found this morning gives an indication of how strict the COVID regime has been in Canada -- and in spite of that, Quebec's premier, whose regime has been one of the strictest, is against Trudeau's invocation of emergency powers:

Quebec stepped up its “deconfinement plan” this week and began lifting coronavirus restrictions, while Premier Francois Legault rejected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s effort to crush the Freedom Convoy protest movement by invoking emergency powers.

“I think that I was very clear with the prime minister that the federal Emergencies Act should not, must not apply in Quebec,” Legault said on Monday. “We don’t have any problems in Quebec so far. The Sureté du Québec has everything under control.”

. . . CTV News reported that size restrictions on private gatherings have been lifted in Quebec, restaurants can seat more customers, four visitors a day are now permitted at old age homes if they have vaccine passports, and seniors are permitted limited outings.

Gyms and spas are now allowed to operate at half capacity, while outdoor events will be allowed with up to five thousand attendees.

Beginning on February 21, capacity limits will be removed on retail outlets, places of worship will be allowed to operate at half capacity, and amusement parks will be allowed to reopen with attendance limits. A week later, the capacity limits are due to be removed from houses of worship and all but the largest arenas, while bars and casinos will be allowed to reopen at half capacity. Most of the capacity limits are supposed to be phased out by the middle of March.

On Tuesday, Quebec announced the beginning of the end for vaccine passports, amusingly beginning with liquor and cannabis stores on Wednesday. The passports will be gone almost entirely by March 14, which is also when Health Minister Christian Dube is expected to begin distributing antiviral treatments for the Wuhan coronavirus.

“Proof of vaccination will still be required for domestic rail and air travel, as mandated by the federal government. Masks will also still be required in all public indoor spaces in the province,” CBC News noted.

In comparison, even in California, restrictions on retail and restaurant capacity pretty much ended in the middle of 2021, while the US Supreme Court effectively ended specific restrictions on houses of worship earlier in that year. The Supreme Court has also made most government efforts to enforce vaccine mandates moot. The debate in the US is now almost exclusively over masking, with most states no longer requiring masks in any environment except schools, where efforts to lift those mandates in certain specific jurisdictions are likely eventually to succeed.

Los Angeles County is one of the few holdouts anywhere for mask mandates outside schools, but the county rule was widely disregarded at the Super Bowl on Sunday, and no effort was made to enforce it.

The extreme differences between Canadian provinces and US states suggest the actual level of frustration with COVID restrictions in Canada and provides some background for the trucker protests.

But I've seen remarkably little analysis of the actual status of Trudeau's emergency powers. As far as I can tell, they don't have legal effect until Parliament approves them.

Less than 24-hours after declaring wide-ranging powers, including terror finance laws to defund the trucker, Trudeau came to parliament to persuade them to support his move.

Conservative Party interim Leader Candice Bergen [confronted Trudeau] over his invocation of the Emergencies Act.

“The Prime Minister invoked the Emergencies Act and 24 hours in, there are more questions than answers,” Bergen said. “Questions about whether this is justified, questions around if the criteria is met, questions around what this means to Canadians’ rights and freedoms.”

“Parliamentary approval is required in order for the prime minister to use this unprecedented sledgehammer,” she noted. “So can the prime minister tell us when will parliament be debating this? Will it be coming to us on Friday? And does he expect that we will look at it Friday, but then rise, take a week off, and not actually deal with this until March?”

. . . Interim Conservative Party leader Bergen made one exceptional point: What if what Trudeau is doing makes things worse?

If the existing restrictiinos in Canada are as bad as they are -- and even the provinces that are relaxing them are taking their time to do it -- I wonder if Trudeau, his supporters, and legacy media are badly misreading the national mood.

Did Putin Win?

With the predicted morning of the Ukraine invasion come and gone without the spetsnaz parachuting in, there have been remarkably few after-action reports in any media. Of the few, this summary at the never-Trump Hot Air blog seems to give the most favorable analysis for Biden's handlers:

“February 15, 2022, will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted. If they really have called off the invasion and they need to huff and puff about western propaganda to save face, have at it. Barring some major secret concession to Putin, it’d be a momentous victory for the White House and NATO to have stopped the biggest war in Europe since World War II without any bombs falling.

Has the invasion been called off, though, or merely postponed?

Ukraine’s president had been warned by western intelligence that tomorrow, the 16th, was the day Russia planned to attack. He decided to make it a “day of unity” for Ukrainians, calling international attention to the date. Maybe Putin looked at that and concluded he’d appear foolish if he followed through by invading on the schedule the west predicted, essentially confirming that western intel knows the moves the Kremlin intends to make before they’ve been made. So he stepped back and called for more diplomacy, altering the timeline for war.

That's under the peculiar assumption that Putin had set a mid-February deadline for unspecified concessions from maybe Ukraine, maybe Biden, or there would be a war. But a February 16 deadline was entirely the creature of Jake Sullivan, Biden's handler. All the other players, from NATO to Ukraine to Putin himself, were at best skeptical. So in effect, Sullivan created a diplomatic straw man and then claimed victory when the straw man did nothing (as straw men are wont to do), interpreting the inaction as "blinking".

The story speculates about potential demands from Putin, primarily that Ukraine never join NATO, but Putin himself never articulated any particular demand as a condition along the line of "if my demand for X is not met, we will invade Ukraine on Febvruary 16". President Kennedy, on the other hand, did articulate specific demands with Khrushchev and did set an effective deadline by instituting a quasi-blockade of Cuba on October 24, 1962. When Soviet ships didn't challenge the blockade, that was an important sign of Soviet concessions.

In contrast, Russian troops performed "maneuvers" near Ukraine with no particular diplomatic reason specified and no particular conditions articulated for their withdrawal. Any conditions or putative deadlines were the creatures of US media and politicians. The Hot Air story continues to put thoughts into Putin's head:

. . . for all the hype about Putin being a master strategist it’s hard to see how he’d gain more from invading Ukraine than he’d lose. The Russian army would take casualties, Putin and his country would face punishing sanctions and economic boycotts, and NATO might end up more united than it’s been in years.

White House sources fleshed that out in conversations with David Ignatius: “The sanctions that would follow an assault on Ukraine would make it hard for Russia to sell its energy abroad or to buy the technology it needs to supply its defense industry, let alone the rest of the economy. Russia’s financial reserves are large, but they would quickly be depleted as it sought to bolster its currency and pay its bills. U.S. officials reckon that under sanctions, Russia would be starved of inputs, and China, its only major ally, couldn’t fill the gaps.” To the extent that retaking Ukraine is a legacy play for Putin, maybe he realized that his legacy from this war wouldn’t be what he expects.

David Ignatius is a Washington Post editor and thoroughly vetted member of the Establishment, a graduate of St Albans School and Harvard, the son of a former Secretary of the Navy and president of The Washington Post. He has been a reliable CIA mouthpiece for generations. The pros and cons he outlines for Putin are entirely his own imputations, or more likely those of some deep stater in Langley, couched entirely in woulds, ifs, reckons, and maybes, but concluding that Biden was somehow the winner in a chess game that was entirely hypothetical.

On the other hand, if we go with the National Interest article theory I've cited, that Putin was responding to moves by Sullivan to push back Russian advances in Crimea and Donbas, it looks like he was entirely successful while reinforcing a picture of Biden as out of touch, unstable, and unreliable even with his Ukrainian and European allies.

It looks like there's a minor effort to make Ukraine look like Biden's Cuban missile crisis, following on an effort to create a wartime atmosphere a la Bill Clinton's desultory cruise missile attacks and intervention in Serbia, all designed primarily to distract attention from his scandals. It doesn't look like this will do Biden any equivalent good on the domestic front, either.

As far as I can see, Putin risked nothing, since he demanded nothing specific and likely never intended an invasion. Biden, on the other hand, created a crisis and set up an atmosphere in which, after much dither and disagreement with President Zelezny, he appeared to have been undermined with his ally and effectively stalemated with Putin. If Putin's actual message was, "Don't even think about Ukraine regaining Crimea and Donbas", then, with never even having to articulate it as a demand, Putin got what he wanted without even appearing to ask.

Ukraine And Intelligence

Here's what I still don't understand about what we're being told in the Ukraine crisis. The claim from National Security Handler Sullivan is that US intelligence says Putin is going to invade tomorrow, maybe, sorta. My first question is that with all the intelligence resources available to him, satellites, drones, signals, bugs, spies on the ground, and everything else, that's the best he can do? Maybe tomorrow? A sub-question to my first question is that the Ukrainians and NATO have equivalent resources, but they don't seem on board with the Sullivan version, especially not the Ukrainians, who are not dullards.

The second question is this. The normal policy with intelligence on when and where an enemy will attack is to conceal that you know it. In 1942, the US broke the Japanese naval code and learned they planned an attack on Midway. They secretly moved a carrier force to intercept the Japanese fleet. They last thing they wanted to do was to reveal that they'd broken the code or that they knew when and where the Japanese would attack. That would have forfeited the whole advantage of surprise.

So why is the US now loudly telegraphing just that? It seems to me that if there were credible indications of an invasion, the US, NATO, and Ukraine would all be strictly concealing their actual knowledge of troop concentrations and anticipated lines of attack, just as was done in the example of Midway.

There's another puzzle. US presidents, or their handlers, only very rarely make global moves while revealing intelligence. The best recent example is President Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, where he announced that Cuban overflights showed the presence of Soviet missiles aimed at the US. In that case, he turned out to be correct. But the other example that comes to mind is Colin Powell's 2003 address to the UN as George W Bush's secretary of state, where he relied on flawed intelligence that claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion of Iraq. This is almost universally regarded as a blunder.

Frankly, if I were a US president, I would not be relying on the predictions of the deep-state organs absent a thorough purge and reorganization. The alternative is simply to come out of it like Powell and Dubya.

As of yesterday, there was a brief flurry in the headlines with a claim that Ukraine President Zelensky had come around on the likelihood of the Russian invasion tomorrow, but this quickly disappeared.

“We are told that February 16 will be the day of the attack,” Zelenskyy said in a video statement posted on Facebook.

However, after his comments were taken by many at face value, his spokesman, Sergii Nykyforov, said that the president, who is a former comedian, was only saying what has been reported elsewhere.

“The president referred to a date that was spread by the media,” the spokesman told NBC News.

Some observers said Zelenskyy appeared to Ukrainian speakers to have been sarcastic when discussing the possible date of an attack.

But an alternate story seems now to be gaining momentum. As of yesterday,

In a televised exchange on Russian TV, the Russian foreign minister told Vladimir Putin that diplomacy still has some potential and should continue to be pursued before the military option for Ukraine gets ordered[.]

Surely this was calculated. And as of this morning,

Russia said on Tuesday some of its troops were returning to base after exercises near Ukraine and it mocked repeated Western warnings about a looming invasion, but NATO said it had yet to see any evidence of de-escalation.

Russia did not say how many units were being withdrawn, and how far, after a build-up of some 130,000 Russian troops to the north, east and south of Ukraine that has triggered one of the worst crises in relations with the West since the Cold War.

But the interpretation in the National Interest story I linked yesterday is that the crisis emerged as the result of a US policy overreach at the start of the Biden administration, where the intent was to push Russia out of Donbas and Crimea. Putin ordered the "exercises" as a warning of what would happen if the US followed through.

The result, it seems to me so far, has been an elaborate face-saving charade on the part of Sullivan and Biden, trying to sell a story that the focused and resolute President Brandon, with his key handler Sullivan at this side, faced down the reckless adventurer Putin. So far, it hasn't worked, but lame duck Speaker Pelosi has nevertheless signed on:

It's about diplomacy deterrence. Diplomacy deterrence. And the President has made it very clear: there's a big price to pay for Russia to go there. So if Russia doesn't invade, it's not that he never intended to. It's just that the sanctions worked.

No, as far as I can see, Putin made a calcutated set of moves throughout 2021 to get the Brandon administration to back off its own adventurist gamble, which Brandon's handlers did in an elaborate and clumsily handled charade.

This Ukraine Business Is Very Strange

Biden's national security handler Jake Sullivan seems to be wandering into Tom Clancy territory, writing thrillers about hypothetical wars:

Sullivan told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that Russian forces are positioned so that an invasion could take place before the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which end on February 20.

. . . Sullivan on Friday had warned Americans in Ukraine to leave and said that military action could begin with an aerial bombardment that could kill civilians.

He reiterated those calls to Tapper on Sunday, saying that a military attack would likely begin with missile and bomb attacks.

"Those are never as precise as the army -- any army -- would like them to be. We don't even know how precise the Russian army would like them to be," Sullivan said. "Innocent civilians could be killed regardless of their nationality. It would then be followed by an onslaught of a ground force moving across the Ukrainian frontier. Again, where innocent civilians could get caught in the cross fire or trapped in places they could not move from. So that is why we are being so clear and direct to American citizens that while commercial transport options are still available, they should take advantage of them."

So not only are the Russians about to invade, but hey, they're about to commit atrocities. Starring Jake Sullivan as Harrison Ford, or maybe Harrison Ford as Joe Biden. Or something. Meanwhile, nothing's changed in Ukraine:

What did we just witness? I refer to the two-month frenzy that seized the Western media, in which Vladimir Putin was massing 175,000 troops on Ukraine’s border for an invasion to begin right about now. The Washington Post led on December 3, 2021, with those big numbers and was duly followed by others. A gigantic massing of forces was taking place. Putin was threatening an invasion and had mobilized his forces to accomplish the final breakage of Ukraine. President Joe Biden was a believer, ordering evacuations from embassies in Ukraine and Belarus. He told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late January that blood would almost certainly flow in the streets of Kiev, the national capital; “prepare for impact” sometime soon, probably in February.

And then a surprising thing happened. The Ukrainian president, the guy whose lead we were apparently following, said, in effect, cut it out. Not true. You’re panicking people in Ukraine, hurting its economy, and besides the Russian troop movements were really nothing out of the ordinary.

. . . This contretemps between the leader of the Free World and the president of the Ukrainian “great power” was very disturbing to the Washington establishment. They thought that Zelensky had flubbed his performance. He was apparently unaware of his proper role. “We’re his most important ally and he’s poking us in the eye and creating daylight between Washington and Kyiv,” said a senior administration official. “It’s self-sabotage more than anything else.”

The story suggests the current manufactured crisis is the result of policy confusion created by Biden's handlers at the start of his administration:

The new team at the White House, closely following a script announced by the Atlantic Council, declared that Crimea and the Donbas must be put back on the table. That meant, explained a Biden official, a “very extensive and almost constant focus on Ukraine from day one.” In the view of Democrats, Donald Trump had been a shameless appeaser of Putin; indeed, he was Putin’s puppet. This narrative, to be sure, was dubious in the extreme, as Trump the ostensible appeaser surrounded himself with advisors—H.R. McMaster, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, James Mattis, and John Bolton—who regularly blasted Russia in scalding tones. But though the narrative may have been wrong, it was theirs. The Democrats believed it. Where Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken largely followed Trump’s line on China, they broke sharply with him over Ukraine.

. . . Russia’s callup of reserves—which both now and in April was interpreted by U.S. intelligence as reflecting plans for a gigantic invasion—was in direct response to . . . important developments: . . . a new U.S. posture toward Ukraine-related issues that was far more aggressive than Trump’s, and the declaration by Ukraine’s military that they were working on a plan to drive the Russians out of [Donbas and Crimea]. When Biden said in December that the United States would not commit forces to Ukraine in the event of a war, it took the legs out from under this plan.

So why keep stirring up a crisis-that's not-a-crisis? That seems to be what's going on:

Biden officials have repeatedly claimed for more than a month that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was “imminent,” prompting protests in the country from officials who complained that the reality on the ground on Ukraine’s eastern border did not match the rhetoric out of the White House and that the latter was tanking Ukraine’s economy – making an invasion more likely.

In early February, Biden officials appeared to announce a retirement of the use of the word “imminent” given the growing discontent in Ukraine, bizarrely claiming that the discord between Washington and Kyiv was a product of how the word translated into Ukrainian.

But there's been no consistency. The story continues:

“I used that [the word imminent] once,” Psaki said on February 2. “And then we stopped using it because I think it sent an — a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision.”

“I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, we said, ‘He could invade at any time.’ That’s true; we still don’t know that he’s made a decision,” Psaki claimed.

Biden himself said during the fateful “minor incursion” press conference that he believed Putin had decided to invade again.

At best, the explanation is incompetence. However, if no invasion takes place by the middle of this week, people need to start asking serious questions about who's in charge.

There's No Single Manifesto, But

Yesterday was Saturday of a holiday weekend in the US, and with little else going on, I spent a good part of the day following events in Canada. What struck me was images like the photo above, which isn't from either Windsor or Ottawa, but in this case, Cornwall, ON, more than an hour from Ottawa and much farther from Windsor. But I kept running into other demonstrations and disruptions in places like Fort Erie, ON or the Michigan side of the Blue Water Bridge north of Detroit.

Meanwhile, although the Windsor police have cleared the trucks blocking the Ambassador Bridge, it is very unclear whether the bridge is actually open to traffic, since demonstrators continue to mill around in the area, and the police seem reluctant to escalate the situation. This is a key factor, which I'll get to. The same circumstance seems to apply in Ottawa, where as far as I could determine yesterday, a party atmosphere continued to prevail, and crowds of the curious, part-time supporters, and partiers caused traffic jams into the city.

Legacy media seems to toe the Trudeau-Ford line, that these are illegal occupations and sieges fomented by a fringe group of disgruntled truckers. As I said above, there's no single Freedom Convoy manifesto, but I think one trucker interviewed in Ottawa correctly interpreted the subtext of the movement, the issue isn't vaccinations or passports -- he estimated that 90% of the truckers in the convoy are vaccinated -- the issue is a new and intrusive level of government interference that was originally sold as temporary, but which the state is increasingly reluctant to dismantle.

As other demonstrators and supporters have pointed out, masks are unnatural, but after two years, there's little official interest in relaxing mask rules. And as a practical matter, since vaccinations have proven far less effective than originally claimed, a regime of revaccination every few months is gradually being imposed on top of continued masking. The goalposts are still being moved, in large part because the original "public health" measures were never specified or approved by anyone, but they look to continue indefinitely even as the ostensible "public health" crisis diminishes.

These are reasonable concerns, and they're being picked up worldwide. The Trudeau-Ford strategy so far is to declare, as Trudeau has, that the COVID rules and the protests are two different things, and the protests are now illegal, but by implication, the COVID rules are not. The COVID rules "suck", as he put it, but everyone needs to go home.

This isn't going to work. It looks like each time a border blockage is cleared, another one pops up, and more ordinary citizens are motivated to take to the streets, as they did in Cornwall and Fort Erie. I've got to say that I hadn't followed Trudeau very closely up to now, but his video appearances show a babyfaced, privileged, callow-looking individual in a retro Beatles hairdo making impotent threats of "severe" consequences for people who do nothing but mill about in the streets with Canadian flags. (Maybe his stylist could get him to update his look and try a mullet.) Not good.

Although Canadians sympathize with the anti-mandate demands of Freedom Convoy, they increasingly hate the protests themselves. A new Maru Public Opinion poll found that 56 per cent of Canadians don’t have an iota of sympathy for Freedom Convoy — and two thirds wouldn’t mind seeing their blockades cleared by military force.

But Canadians are also turning their ire on a “weak” government response and an intransigent prime minister whom they blame for “inflaming” the situation. The Maru poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9 to 10, found that only 16 per cent of Canadians would vote for Trudeau based on his actions of the last two weeks.

I'm not sure how many Canadians actually watch the TV news and wish the Mounties would start cracking heads. But a bigger problem is that the Mounties themselves, and the other police services, don't want to crack heads either. I would guess they feel very uncomfortable with the position Trudeau and Ford want to put them in, the goon squad waiting in the wings with tear gas and rubber bullets. My sense is that their actual position is roughly the same as police leadership south of the border: they don't have the resources to end such large-scale demonstrations even if they wanted to do it.

They can't conduct or process mass arrests. Rank and file officers sympathize with the demonstrators. Violent police action would be an immense setback for community relations. A couple of well-publicized episodes of head-cracking in Ottawa last week, I would guess, focused the chain of command on how badly things could turn out for them, and I suspect department policy was quickly, clearly, and forcefully articulated to officers as a result. Arrests of any sort in such demonstrations seem to run in the single digits nationally, and this isn't going to change.

The impression I have is that both Ford and Trudeau are on the losing side of a political battle that has lost its public health justification, don't have the sense to temporize, and are frozen at the controls. Biden is in a similar bind south of the border.