Understanding Musk

There can be few better arguments for the idea that Twitter is, or had been, a de facto agency for government censorship than the Biden administration's proposal for a new Disinformation Governance Board only days after Twitter's directors accepted Elon Musk's buyout offer. But the ramifications go beyond the predictable political alignments. Witness the reaction of the Never Trump Hot Air blog:

Very encouraging that the new owner thinks it was bad form to silence a guy who had just incited a riot by conspiracy theorists at the Capitol and seemed capable of inciting a lot more amidst his mania to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump can rest easy now knowing that his mic won’t be cut the next time he tries a coup, I guess.

This report from the WSJ makes me consider a question to which only Elon Musk himself knows the answer. Namely, to what extent is buying a Twitter a business decision for him? Does he feel pure altruism in wanting to improve an influential communications platform by, among other things, trying to ensure that it treats all of its users fairly? Or are there bottom-line considerations?

I ask because it seems to me that having Donald Trump back on the platform would be good for business in various ways. Yeah, fine, “free speech” and all that. But there’s money to be made too.

Why bring Trump into this at all? Trump so far hasn't changed his position that he won't use Twitter again, but the writer's basic question here has nothing to do with Trump: is Musk doing this out of altruism, or is there money to be made? It sounds to me as though Allahpundit is as deeply suspicious of Musk as he is of Trump -- either Musk is naively altruistic (a billionaire? really?) or, like billionaire Trump himself, he's just cynically bottom-line.

The first thing Allahpundit doesn't understand about US million/billionaires is that most, even those mainly identified as tech moguls or steel-and-railroad industrialists, have always had either a direct investment in media or have at least clearly understood it. Thomas Edison was a pioneer in the film and record industries as well as light bulbs and utilities. Jay Gould, best known as one of the railroad robber barons, also controlled Western Union and worked closely with Edison to improve telegraph technology. His telegraph interests were always closely integrated with his railroads, with Western Union lines sharing rail rights of way.

William Randolph Hearst was a media mogul, though he also took an interest in politics. Joseph Kennedy was a stock market and real estate investor who branched into Hollywood. Steve Jobs was a tech innovator somewhat like Edison, but as he grew older, his focus was increasingly on media. Rockefeller Sr retired and put the family fortune under the control of Rockefeller Jr, who listened to Ivy Lee, the founder of modern public relations, effectively preserving the family's reputation through decades of attacks by muckrakers and socialists.

In that context, there's nothing unusual or particularly untrustworthy about Musk. An operator at that level is simply going to see opportunities in media that others will miss. Another skeptical piece from a different writer at Hot Air at least gets closer to Musk's likely intent:

Twitter has accepted Elon Musk’s offer but there are lots of people suggesting that Musk either can’t or won’t be able to complete the deal for various reasons.

. . . No sign from Musk that he’s having second thoughts so far but the idea of him changing course is certainly circulating at the moment. Another reason people are questioning the deal is that Twitter isn’t a very profitable company. Normally this type of leveraged buyout scenario would target a company that has a lot more profit.

. . . one way to make this deal make more sense would be to cut staffing dramatically.

So people are scratching their heads about Musk's motives but speculating there will be massive layoffs? What interests me here is that political writers like those at Hot Air, or indeed business writers, have apparently had no experience working in tech. I spent the latter years of my career commuting up to Silicon Valley, where the working environment is unique: free popcorn, free sodas, games in the break room, free beer on Fridays, set your own schedule, and the like.

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but the people who work in that environment are spectacularly unproductive. I'd waste whole mornings waiting for my counterparts to get off the phone with their brokers. The UK Daily Mail has at least a suggestion of what might be on Musk's mind:

Twitter staff have been told that their jobs are safe for at least six months, until Elon Musk takes over under the terms of a $44 billion deal to take control of the company, agreed on Monday.

. . . Concerns about immediate job losses were allayed, with employees told that business will operate as usual until a deal closes in next six months, Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner reported.

Staff were told there would be no layoffs 'at this time' - but no guarantees were provided when Musk takes over.

. . . In internal message rooms there was uproar, The New York Times reported.

'I feel like im going to throw up..I rly don't wanna work for a company that is owned by Elon Musk,' one staffer said, according to their reporter Talmon Smith.

Smith's source told him that it was 'absolutely insane' in the internal chat rooms.

Another Twitter employee reportedly complained: 'I don't rly know what I'm supposed to do…oh my god, my phone's been blowing up…We have a meeting about it at 5pm…the CEO is going to address everyone about it' (it=elon).

I have a feeling the real concern at Twitter is less about whether Trump will be back than how many people will still get beer on Fridays. In some ways, that would be a move as interesting as a former Ukrainian comic driving the final stake into the heart of Stalinism, and nearly as consequential.

Twitter wasn't making money, but it was indulging and spoiling a bloated staff who, when some of them got around to it, were providing a free censorship service to the deep state. Musk is asking, as far as I can see, first, why this service is being provided for free, or indeed at all, and second, why so many people are doing no useful work. Drop the free stuff, both to the government and the workers, and produce something people will buy.

I'm not sure why anyone sees a problem here.

Rope-a-Dope

Accordding to Wikipedia,

The rope-a-dope is a boxing fighting technique in which one contender draws non-injuring offensive punches (sometimes while leaning against the rope of the boxing ring) to let the opponent tire themselves out. This gives the former the opportunity to then execute devastating offensive maneuvers to help them win. The rope-a-dope is most famously associated with Muhammad Ali in his October 1974 Rumble in the Jungle match against world heavyweight champion George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire.

It seems to me that the Ukrainian strategy, as well as defeat in detail, which I've discussed here, is also rope-a-dope. So far, I haven't seen any analysis of the war that covers this, which is an argument for staying away from sites like ISW and spending time on the reddit /r ukraine conflict site. Here is a thread there based on a Twitter thread that quotes a Russian's detailed account of his deployment in Donbas:

. . . At the start of March the brigade moved towards Rubezhnoe. Advanced from north. As witnesses described, on one of the forest roads at the approach to the town the column stopped and sent forward reconnaissance. Reconnaissance discovered two Ukrainian strong points. Ukrainians were not suspecting anything. For 40 minutes at the brigade they were deciding what to do. In this time, Ukrainians spotted the column and opened heavy fire from mortars and artillery. In this attack, the military personnel of our battalion halved without entering combat. Further I'll be writing about my own battalion, since I'm not familiar with actions of others.

At the time, myself together with Vit'ka and Irishman were in Luhansk trying to join the war, I wrote about this here. The Irishman through his acquaintances in hospital was claiming some monstrous numbers of 200's [killed in action] and 300's, [wounded] but I didn't believe back then. As I realised later, we couldn't leave because those who were meant to transfer us were busy delivering 300's and identifying 200's. Later, at the battalion location, light wounded who were coming back confirmed the losses.

After this defeat the battalion dismounted and laid down. Frost, snow, we laid down under shelling for three days. Starting fires was forbidden. Frostbitten in large numbers were added to the existing losses. Basically, by the time of the assault, only about a third of personnel was left in the battalion.

Next, with support of brigade artillery there was an assault of the northern part of town with 5-9 storeys buildings. Ukrainians didn't defend them and fairly quickly fell back to prepared positions in the private residential areas. At the end of March, Chechens housed in these buildings and posted staged videos about them 'heroically' cleaning up the 5-storey houses that were cleared two days before them.

Yet what began next was a complete f*ckery. As a strong point the Ukrainians used concrete garages . . .

They prepared positions superbly. South of the position was a low ground protecting from artillery. It was connected to communication pathways. At the ends of the streets leading north through the village were concrete pillboxes. In the village quarters 'fire bags' were organised beforehand - those were cleared crossfire sectors with machine gun points in basements and prepared sniper positions. And in those 'fire bags' were carefully laid pathways with smashed through sheds and fences. Fighters attempting reconnaissance by force go through yards so as to avoid going through streets that are shot-through. They don't know who made these pathways - possibly our own. And through these pathways they came under cross-fire of machine guns and snipers. Groups perished without even realising they were being shot at.

. . .A group entered one of those 'bags'. Immediately nine 200's. The commander was without a scratch. He came back, took more people, and went to pick up the 200's the same path. Had three more killed. And so - for a week. In the end, there were twenty 200's that couldn't be picked up for several weeks. An order to 'pull out 200's' became equivalent to 'go and die!

By mid-April, from the 'pre-war' personnel of our company only a couple people remained. Now they were sending volunteers and reservists into combat. Most volunteers had the experience of 2014-2015, but this was a totally different war and their experience wasn't helping with anything. And reservists - those were miners caught on the streets without any experience. No one cared. Grab the machine gun and go, under mortar fire. There was a catastrophic shortage of people, fighters weren't withdrawn from the frontline for a month and more. Many were losing their shit from the overload. Some started drinking heavily, thankfully there was no shortage of booze at the frontline. With pure mathematics, the chances of leaving the frontline alive and not wounded were close to zero. The longer you stay there, the fewer chances you have left. From those who I was friends or shared bread with, in two weeks eight people died. Others wounded or concussed. In a week, three company commanders changed - two perished. No officers of company-squad level were left at all.

In mid-April, after numerous attacks and big losses, the garages were finally captured. After a day, from the low ground came a Ukrainian tank and simply destroyed the garages to the ground. Ukrainian tanks work there completely unpunished. This 9-storey house neighbouring us, two Ukrainian tanks were taking apart for several hours - calmly and methodically. Where was our artillery looking at the time - f*ck knows.

But let's put this in the context of typical analysis by just about everyone of a "static" front in eastern Ukraine, for instance in this major think piece at the Red State blog:

The initial concept that appeared to be developing a double envelopment from the salients to the north and south is not [sic] more. Instead, the Russians have been making slow, methodical progress and seem to be limiting their attacks based on available supplies. The Ukrainians are giving ground grudgingly.

The account above from the Russian point of view is entirely different. Russian commanders are being enticed into what they think will be easy gains in Ukrainian-held villages, only to find their units horribly chewed up in pre-prepared kill "bags", with each perceived gain simply leading them into new traps. The Daily Kos assessment is also without insight:

Turns out, no one is making big sweeping gains. It’s all “lay down artillery until defenders get the f’ out, walk in. Leave when their artillery returns fire.” Rinse, lather, repeat.

I don't see this. The result oif Ukraine's strategy throughout the war so far has been to exhaust the Russian army as it makes ineffective punches without progress toward its objectives -- in short, rope-a-dope. The effectiveness of the strategy can be gauged, first, by the Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv axis, and now by the Russian appointment of its senior general, Valery Gerasimov, to take over command of the Donbas region from Southern Military District Commander Alexander Dvornikov, who had failed to achieve his expected objectives after only a short time in command as the enormous Russian losses continue.

And one thing the Ukrainians are really good at is wiping out generals when they visit the front lines. I think the Russians are much closer to a loss than the conventional wisdom thinks.

Bad Writing And Ukraine Analysis

I spent the first part of my working career making red (or blue) marks like those above, and I thereby learned what Samuel Johnson meant when he said teaching is "intricate misery". If I discovered anything else in the process, it was that bad writing has a close relation to bad thinking, but I'm not sure if I can go much beyond that.

This seems to apply to what passes for prestigious analysis of the current war in Ukraine, especially from the Institute for the Study of War. Let's take a passage from their April 26 update:

Russian forces have adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine, at least along the line from Izyum to Rubizhne. Russian troops are pushing down multiple roughly parallel roads within supporting distance of one another, allowing them to bring more combat power to bear than their previous practice had supported.

This could actually be a good introductory sentence for several subsequent paragraphs giving specific instances, but it's followed only by a few sentences that are essentially unsupported:

Russian troops on this line are making better progress than any other Russian advances in this phase of the war. They are pushing from Izyum southwest toward Barvinkove and southeast toward Slovyansk. They are also pushing several columns west and south of Rubizhne, likely intending to encircle it and complete its capture.

They're pushing, and they're pushing, and they'll likely, but if they're so much sounder, why haven't they done it yet? The whole story of the eastern front so far has been that it's static. Contrast this assessment with yesterday's analysis from the Daily Kos, which I think is better written and probably more accurate, though less prestigious:

Russia continued making slow, grinding progress on Wednesday, taking five settlements, repulsed on six other approaches, and pushing into some of the larger towns. Ukrainian resistance is stiff.

I won’t belabor the point I’ve made repeatedly—how Russia [is] guilty once again of spreading its forces thin across way too many lines of attack. Yes, they’ve had some tactical victories, taking a town here or there, but they are still failing their strategic goal of taking the entire Donbas region and building a land bridge that extends all the way across Ukraine’s south, through Odesa, and on to Moldova’s Transnistria region.

Remember, Russia had loads of tactical victories around Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv. How’d that turn out for them strategically?

. . . It’s been two weeks since Russia announced their big Donbas offensive, yet Russia has managed to push only ~22 kilometers (14 miles) to the south and west. That leaves just another 240-320 kilometers (~150-200 miles) of roads to go to close the gap to the south (depending on the route), not to mention all the territory in the middle, which at around 5,000 square miles, would entirely fit the state of Connecticut.

The Daily Kos analysis is far more concrete and even asks pertinent questions, which the ISW analysis completely leaves out. Now, I'm interested in this war, and being retired, I have time on my hands, so I'm able to look around for the best information. In general, the ISW is currently unique in insisting the Russians have cleaned up their act -- but the question remains that if their operational pattern is now sounder, as the ISW claims, why aren't we seeing them benefit from it? This is effectively the point the Daily Kos is raising.

The ISW says the Russians are making "better progress", but there's no specific comparison. This is no different from claiming our detergent will get your clothes 50% cleaner. The Russian progress so far is actually similar to what we saw around Kyiv, which is the point the Daily Kos makes. There, we saw seesawing along a largely static front, followed soon enough by a complete Russian collapse.

It's worth noting that the lead author of the April 26 ISW post I've linked here as a bad example is again Frederick W Kagan, the Ivy Leaguer with a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history, and who as I noted more than two weeks ago, seems inclined not just to repeat conventional wisdom but to create it himself ex nihilo. There's been a school of thought that goes more or less, "Just wait. The Russians are going to regroup, recalibrate, and refit, and we'll see a real advance n the Donbas." But so far, other than an advance here countered by a retreat there, we still aren't seeing it, but Kagan is sticking to his guns, and I think he's even jiggering his analysis to accommodate it.

And this leaves aside the increasing reports that the US-NATO heavy artillery that had been moving to Ukraine over the past two weeks is reaching the front, along with the trained Ukraine units to use it. The best reports I've been able to find are still at the reddit r/ ukraine conflict site. They are anecdotal and often unconfirmed, but I think they're a good counterbalance to the more respectable but badly written and badly reasoned analysis elsewhere.

Boy, That Was Fast

So fat, I haven't seen any commentary that ties the events of the past two weeks together.

• April 14: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter
• April 18: U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle strikes down the federal mask mandate for airplanes and other modes of public transportation
• April 21: CNN announces cacellation of CNN+
• April 22: Florida Gov Ron DeSantis signs bill revoking special Disney status in the state
• April 25: Twitter board unanimously accepts Musk buyout offer.

In the space of a week and a half, the country took important steps to bring itself out of the 2020 moral panic. This included a major defeat for woke control of key news and entertainment and a near-final end to most COVID restrictions. There's been a lot of reaction to each individual event, especially the Musk takeover of Twitter, but nobody's seeing this as a much bigger milestone.

If I were to go farther with the big picture, I'd say this is taking place in the context of the Ukraine war. Again, few people are noting the effect of Volodymyr Zelensky as a world figure, although some are, interestingly in the context of the Aristotelian virtues, especially courage. For instance, at the UK Tablet,

The heroic struggle of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky against the tyrant Putin’s invasion of Ukraine represents nothing less than the return of noble manliness in our era. Improbably, he rose from portraying a Ukrainian president on a hit comedy series to becoming president in real life. His dressed-down khaki jacket and T-shirt shows solidarity with ordinary Ukrainians and has an Israeli feel. Don’t do what I ask because I’m president, he says. Do it because you’re Ukrainian.

, , , The idea of manly virtue has been discounted for many years now in our institutions of higher learning, frequently identified with “toxic masculinity” and other supposed threats to proper order. The caricature of manliness that our institutions now offer us is identified exclusively with barbarism and misogyny. . . . The classical standard for true manliness was still witnessed in modern democratic politics with leaders like Lincoln and Churchill. Though neither man was free of flaws, they had an inner compass that at their best moments guided what they aspired to be and how they governed. The emergence of Zelensky reminds us that such leaders can still emerge from the Western masculine ideal.

I've mentioned both Lincoln and Churchill in connection with Zelensky here. Churchill in particular was addressing a multinational audience, in particular due to the need for the UK to enlist American support against Hitler and Japan. Zelensky's task has been even bigger, to address the need first, for NATO and the West to abandon policies of appeasement toward Putin at all, and then for NATO and the West to man up against the fear that offending Putin by sending Ukraine heavy weapons would "start World War III".

His ability to do this, especially to move a weak, corrupt, and feminized US president who urged him to flee the country in the first hours of the invasion, gradually, first into not objecting to minimal aid to Ukraine (though apparently vetoing the transfer of Polish Migs), but eventually giving the US generals a free hand in providing whatever weapons and other assistance Zelensky requested, speaks for virtue at a classical and historic level. This is beyond David and Goliath; it's maybe, as a few have noted, more like Moses and Pharaoh.

Let's look at Wikipedia's account of how Elon Musk decided to take over Twitter:

On March 20, 2022, the Twitter account of conservative satire website The Babylon Bee was suspended for referring to U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, as their "Man of The Year", which Twitter stated violated its policy on "hateful conduct". The Babylon Bee refused to delete the tweet in order to regain access to the account, and Twitter rejected their appeal. According to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, the website was contacted by Musk shortly after the suspension to confirm whether they had been suspended, who mused that he "might need to buy Twitter". On March 24, Musk began tweeting statements critical of Twitter, polling his followers on whether Twitter adhered to the principle that "free speech is essential to a functioning democracy"

Wikipedia makes the point that as early as 2017, in response to a tweet suggesting Musk buy Twitter, he replied, "How much is it?", and Musk had been accumulating Twitter shares since January 2022, before anyone knew the name Zelensky. Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid the idea that Zelensky's leadership has created an atmosphere in which Musk could succeed in his bid, and certainly in which his bid could become viable.

The forces of wokeness have been in disorder since the middle of this month, but maybe even more significant, so has a certain segment of the Right. Tucker Carlson, who'd originally seemed likely to inherit Rush Limbaugh's mantle, has retained his anti-Zelensky position. The never-Trump Right is opposed to Musk's takeover of Twitter, as well as DeSantis's revocation of Disney's special treatment in Florida.

My take on Limbaugh is he'd have been pro-Zelensky, pro-Ukraine from the start. I'm really sorry we don't have his commentary now. More is happening than in Ukraine, but Ukraine is oddly driving the rest of it.

Just Say No

The meme above is from Roy, a guy I first met 40 years ago. To say he is something of a character is an understatement. His main post-retirement activity is to dress to the nines and take selfies at LA cultural sites, of which there are many, and post them on Facebook, so he's busy. Recently he's been taking maskless selfies on Metrolink trains to make the point that even before last week's order from Judge Mizelle, Metrolink staff had stopped enforcing the mask mandates, we must assume with the tacit endorsement of both their union and management.

Last week I posted on what I speculated was Metrolink's dilemma when "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the LA County health director, issued an order saying that despite the TSA's ceasing mask enforcement, with Amtrak and the airlines following suit, public transit in LA County must continue to enforce masking. Among the problems I saw in this was that Metrolink operates in four other counties besides LA, and a train that starts in LA County usually finishes its run in one of the others. Can people take off their masks when the train leaves the county?

Roy provided a link to a clarification in his Facebook post:

Confusion in trains as riders in Orange County and Inland Empire asked to wear masks – again.

"I thought that was over" and "I don’t have one" were the most common phrases we heard at train stations along the Metrolink lines outside Los Angeles County. Earlier this week, riders heard they no longer had to wear masks after a federal judge struck down the Biden Administration's mask mandate on planes and other forms of public transportation stating that the mandate exceeded the authority of U.S. health officials.

However, Los Angeles County health officials are, again, mandating masks on public transit, citing a rise in COVID-19 infection rates. As a result, Metrolink officials are asking riders on its system, even in lines and stations not in LA County, to wear masks.

"We are not kicking people out if they are not wearing them," said Scott Johnson, director of Communications at Metrolink.

Johnson forwarded FOX 11 the following statement, explaining Metrolink's position:

"Following the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health issuing a Health Officer Order that masking in all public transit within LA County and in LA County indoor transportation hubs continues to be required, Metrolink is asking all passengers aboard Metrolink trains systemwide to once again wear a mask aboard all Metrolink trains.

Just as we did Monday when Metrolink followed a federal directive to lift the mask mandate, we will continue to monitor the situation and adjust as needed with passenger safety as the focus."

The back and forth is making it difficult for many riders we spoke to. Even those who prefer to wear masks, and had them, admit it can be confusing. One rider explained he and his wife just got off a plane, where they were glad to not have to wear a mask, and find that having to wear it on a much emptier train seems unnecessary. Still, many we talked to say they will comply, and plan on carrying masks on their person, regardless. Others say they will refuse, and stop catering to businesses that insist on it, be it a restaurant, and yes, even the train.

A basic principle that's being proven in all the COVID restrictions is that off-again-on-again eventually makes them unenforceable, especially when jurisdictions conflict. A bigger problem for LA County is that its order specifically listed one condition for ending it would be if the CDC ends its own mask mandate, which is effectively suspended anyhow just about everywhere but LA County and some New York area agencies. The current CDC extension is set to end on May 3, a week away.

I would guess that Metrolink was in a bind, as there must have been some type of discussion with the union on whether employees were required to enforce masking -- I assume this was never in the contract, and employees didn't want to continue to do it, especially if having to remove recalictrants from a train and risk of personal harm was involved. So Metrolink is publicly splitting the baby, saying they'll "ask" but not enforce, hoping it won't last long.

As of now, we have no news on whether the CDC intends to ask for yet another extension, but even if they do, in light of the fact that it's no longer enforced in most of the country, its days are numbered no matter what. Overall, in light of the damage the lockdowns and business restrictions did, it's probably just as well that the public health establishment has effectively destroyed its credibility for years to come. Let's face it, this has been the main contribution of Drs Fauci, Walensky, and Levine, as well as "Dr" Ferrer, to the general public welfare.

And Roy, of course, is right.

What's The Story On Ukraine?

I'm still puzzled at the horrible quality of Ukraine war analysis. Here's a snippet of yesterday's assessment from the Institute for the Study of War:

CORRECTION: ISW mistakenly reported on April 23 that Russian troops seized Lozova, Kharkiv Oblast, approximately 100km west of Izyum. Russian troops actually seized Lozove, Donetsk Oblast, approximately 35km east of Izyum. We apologize for the error.

Every few days there's something like this. The authors listed at the top of yesterday's assessment are Mason Clark and Kateryna Stepanenko. Stepanenko is a Ukrainian name, and I assume that Ms Stepanenko is a native speaker and (at least presumably) famiiar with the country's geography. As far as I can see, this would be roughly equivalent to a California writer confusing Monterey, CA with Monterey Park, CA, locations 325 miles apart, an extremely sloppy error. I don't know what staff members at ISW make, but I've got to think whatever it is, it's too much.

The same ISW assessments had been predicting complete Russian victory in Mariupol "within days" throughout March and the first weeks of April, when the defenders in the Azov steel plant have continued to hold out and as of today are still being resupplied.

The question I have is whether the level of incompetence we see at the ISW also reflects a similar level in our intelligence and defense planning -- I assume staff at think tanks pass interchangeably into intelligence agencies, and this could well explain how the US utterly miscalculated the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Zelensky's ability to rally not just his own country but much of the West. The Mason Clarks and Kateryna Stepanenkos are presumably keeping up their mortgage payments in Bethesda nonetheless.

A New Yorker piece, Is the Russian Military a Paper Tiger? raises this question at least tangentially. The author interviews Joel Rayburn, a retired Army colonel now at a think tank, who suggests the whole Russian plan for invasion was unworkable from the start:

I think, over all, the campaign design was flawed from the start. It was an invasion force that was too small for the task, just in straight numbers—in the numbers of combat units, combat formations they were able to put on the battlefield. That task was essentially to dismember Ukraine and change the regime in Kyiv, and the force was too small for that purpose.

. . . What we can now see is that they simply do not have the institutional capacity to support offensive operations deep into enemy territory and aren’t able to give units supply and combat support of all kinds: artillery support, air support, air-defense support. With an already weak logistics base, it was an enormous mistake for them to chop their main offensive into four major axes that were widely geographically dispersed.

. . . And then they’re showing up on the battlefield in the axis of advance toward Kharkiv and Chernihiv and Kyiv with Cold War-era, non-modernized, armored combat vehicles—both infantry vehicles and tanks. And it’s like they took these things out of mothballs.

. . . What we’ve seen in action is a military machine on the Russian side that could not pull off a confrontation with any NATO power. So escalating into a confrontation with NATO would be suicidal for them. And I have to believe that they’re not suicidal. Imagine if that invasion force had stumbled into Poland instead. The casualties that we’re seeing now are high enough, but the entire invasion force would’ve been wiped out.

All well and good, but, er, even Col Rayburn is talking as though this was a surprise (and I assume his mortgage in Bethesda is up to date as well). Why was all this a surprise? US intelligence has made a point that it did in fact correctly predict Putin's invasion in late February -- but what about everything it's failed to predict since then? The mantra up until very recently was "we don't want to start World War III" by offending Putin in some way, like sending Ukraine heavy weapons or Migs.

Thankfully that's been dropped once the level of Russian incompetence became clear. But what caused our own massive miscalculation in the West? I wonder if these aren't the nieces, nephews, and Ivy League protégés of the same people who brought us the failure to predict the Soviet collapse more than a generation ago.

Some See The Glass Half Empty

Here's a headline at The New Republic: Biden Quits The Covid Fight. Some people -- quite possibly a strong majority -- would indeed be clapping, cheering, and tossing their masks in the trash for good. At TNR, not so much:

On Monday, a Trump-appointed judge of questionable legal credentials and an appetite for fileting the English language struck down the CDC’s requirement that “a person must wear a mask while boarding, disembarking, and traveling on any conveyance into or within the United States.” Within hours, major carriers lifted the mask requirements, in some cases during flights, sandbagging passengers who’d taken comfort knowing their fellow passengers were masked.

Now, there's an odd way of looking at it: somewhere in the back rows of Flight 572, hidden behind the passengers twirling their masks on their fingers and dancing in delight, is some grinch hunched over in his seat, sandbagged in the recognition that his fellow passengers were discarding their masks and now free to spread the virus unchecked. The airline didn't even have the decency to wait until the plane had landed and the passengers had disembarked to make the announcement!

In fact, this is now seen as a potential problem for the industry:

While we saw many videos of airline passengers joyously celebrating and tossing their face masks into trash bags when the mandate was lifted, not everyone was happy about it. In fact, some people began making preparations to cancel upcoming trips because of their fear of sitting on the same airplane as someone who is not masked up. But will those people be offered a refund for tickets that they had purchased in advance?

But it's worse than that. Consider the dilemma of the grinch on Flight 572, whose journey isn't over when the plane lands in Denver -- he has to transfer to another flight, and this one will now be full of the unmasked! He'll have no choice in the matter! Even if he demands a refund, he still has to find a way home! And let's say he decides to rent a car to finish his trip instead of flying with the unmasked. He'll still need to ride the shuttle to the rental agency, and likely nobody on the shuttle will wear masks, either! And that doesn't even solve the problem of the unmasked in the gate and terminal areas now that the TSA is no longer enforcing the mandate!

And it gets worse. Does Hertz still sanitize and fully disinfect its cars between each rental? Contrast that with the reaction of a flight attendant to the end of the mandate:

Since the beginning of COVID, the disposition of the customers has been pretty angry. They’d get on the plane upset. And for the first time, it felt like everybody was just very relaxed, which was shocking. Everybody was much calmer, much happier. It was bizarre, because I was like, Wow, this mask really was what was making all of these people mad. It was like people were just directly angry at me every time I went to work. I’ve been doing a lot of flying in and out of Florida these past few days, so I don’t know if that matters, but for the first time, the job has felt like what it was before COVID.

. . . We also kind of felt like it was time. Because at this point, people were coming on with the masks half on, and they were super annoyed if you were telling them to pull it back up. Definitely near the end it was worse, because people were just kind of tired of wearing the masks.

I think we can extrapolate from the flight attendant's remarks that people were angry because they knew from the start that the whole COVID thing was a charade, and the airlines and flight attendants had been tasked with being the tip of the spear in that theater of the Plebe War. The airlines became the prime movers in dropping the charade.

I feel bad for the guy at The New Republic, who sounds like he might even need to go into therapy to deal with people who are putting his health -- indeed, his life -- at risk by flying without masks. For some, it's going to be a hard process to get back to normal life.

Here's What I Don't Understand

On April 13, the CDC extended its airline and transit mask mandate for another 15 days, until May 3.

The decision was made in response to the increasing spread of the omicron subvariant in the U.S. and an increase in the 7-day moving average of cases, which have risen by around 25% over the last two weeks nationally. Certain states are seeing much larger increases in new cases.

The CDC is following the science with this latest decision, says James Hodge, who directs the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University.

"I believe that a two-week period is just enough to say we're watching very carefully," he says. "If we pull this mask mandate, we will have extended numbers of infections — that's not responsible and that's counter to the public's health."

However, there has been growing pressure on the Biden administration to lift the mask rule.

This in itself is contradictory: the reasons the public health expert quoted above gives for extending the mandate is "a two-week period is just enough to say we're watching very carefully". This sounds a lot like mom and dad saying a two-week period for being grounded is just enough to send a message, or something like that. But in the next sentence, he says, "If we pull this mask mandate, we will have extended numbers of infections," which is different -- they're not just sending a message, they're keeping us from getting sick.

But the problem continues to be that while omicron is more contagious, it's not more fatal. People keep piping up that maybe the CDC should be using a metric other than "cases" if that's so, and the CDC never quite gets around to making the change. It keeps sounding more and more as if mom and dad want us to stay grounded but won't say why.

So in the middle of this 15-day extension of an extension. a federal judge throws out the whole mask mandate as unconstitutional. The airlines, which wanted to get rid of it, announced the decision in the middle of flights in the air, and passengers cheered, applauded, and threw their masks in the trash bags. The administration dithered and sent the decision on whether to appeal the judge's ruling to the CDC, which decided yes, it would ask the Justice Department to appeal. According to CNN,

The Justice Department on Wednesday appealed a ruling by a federal judge that struck down the mask mandate for mass transportation, following a recommendation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It is CDC's continuing assessment that at this time an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health," the CDC said in a statement. "CDC will continue to monitor public health conditions to determine whether such an order remains necessary. CDC believes this is a lawful order, well within CDC's legal authority to protect public health."

. . . The appeal means that the administration will head to a higher court to extend the mandate -- despite the fact that many airlines and public transit systems have already decided to make masks optional following the court ruling.

The Justice Department's appellate filings didn't immediately include a request for a stay seeking to put the court order on hold and reinstate the mask mandate, a standard move in emergency circumstances.

My sense is that even at the CDC, someone understood that enforcing the reinstated mandate would be seen by some large part of the population as arbitrary and would be met at minimum by large-scale disobedience, if not by renewed disturbances on airlines. In fact, nearly all the airlines and agencies that announced they would no longer enforce the mandate immediately following the judge's order have continued their policies of non enforcment after the CDC's reinstatement. (Yesterday my Facebook friend posted another maskless selfie on Metrolink, despite "Dr" Ferrer's order that Metrolink resume enforcing the mandate.) Indeed, CDC or no,

“With masks now optional, Delta will restore flight privileges for customers on the mask non-compliance no-fly list only after each case is reviewed and each customer demonstrates an understanding of their expected behavior when flying with us,” Delta representatives told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

. . . Separately, American Airlines AAL, -0.20% and United Airlines UAL, +1.20% have both indicated that they are willing to lift the bans they imposed now that masks are optional on flights.

So here's the rub. In reiterating the continuing need for masks in arbitrary circumstances, the CDC said it "remains necessary for the public health". But nobody's listening, and more important, as far as we can tell, nobody's getting sicker, which is simply proving that the mandate is arbitrary and unnecessary.

And as of now, the extension of the extension of the mandate is still scheduled to expire May 3, a little over a week away. If nobody but the LA County health director and some (but not all) transit agencies is observing it now, will that change if the CDC extends it again? The only justification for either extending the mandate or appealing the judge's decision is to preserve the CDC's ability to mandate masks in the future, but at this stage, the CDC and Drs Walensky and Fauci are simply confirming their status as national jokes. If there were a new COVID-22 epidemic tomorrow, the CDC already would have much diminished credibility to reinstate any sort of measures like thoae they've exhausted with COVID-19 no matter what.

Isn't this counterproductive?

The Official COVID Panic Descends Into Absurdity

After four days, Philadelphia rescinded the indoor mask mandate it had suddenly reimposed. None of the corporate news outlets speculates on why the city reimposed it. but it's likely the authorities there expected it to kick off a domino effect where other blue jurisdictions would follow suit. Instead, the next day, a Florida federal judge ruled the airline and transit mask mandate unconstitutional.

In the case of Philadephia reimposing an indoor mask mamdate, there at least is a minmimal consistency: if your business is within city limits, the mandate applies; if not, it doesn't, although there's little other justification -- what changes if Joe's Bar, 50 feet outside the city, doesn't require masks, but Bill's Bar, inside the city, does? Will there be any difference in the medical risks, which must be at the same minimal level in either case?

The response of "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the Los Angeles County health director in the image above, is even crazier. In response to the judge's order, which has led airlines, Amtrak, and some transit agencies to rescind their mask requirements, she's said not so fast.

Public Health is issuing Health Officer Order to note that masking in all public transit within LA County and in LA County indoor transportation hubs continues to be required.

Per the revised Order, masking continues to be required to be worn by everyone, 2 years of age and older, regardless of their COVID-19 vaccination status, on public transit within the County. This includes wearing masks on commuter trains, subways, buses, taxis, and ride-shares. Masking continues to be also required in indoor transportation hubs including airport and bus terminals, train and subway stations, seaport or other indoor port terminals, or any other indoor area that serves as a transportation hub.

Public Health will reassess the indoor masking requirement when COVID-19 community transmission in Los Angeles County drops to the Moderate level, OR the CDC’s assessment is that an order requiring masking in the transportation corridor is no longer necessary for protection of the public’s health, OR within 30 days of this Order, whichever occurs first.

As far as anyone can tell, this exempts airlines, Greyhound buses, and Amtrak trains themselves, although you must wear a mask inside airports and railroad terminals. But here's the problem, just starting with taxis, Uber, and Lyft: the LA metropolitan area is big; lots of it is outside LA County. If I call a cab in Pomona, which is in LA County, to take me to Ontario Airport, which is six miles away but in San Bernardino County, at worst I'll need to mask up for just a few minutes until we cross the county line, when I can rip it off without penalty (and presumably without any added medical risk).

Indeed, Ontario Airport is a major regional hub but outside "Dr" Ferrer's jurisdiction, and neither the airlines nor the TSA has any interest in enforcing mask rules there. Her order is a futile gesture and largely unenforceable even inside the county -- how many Uber drivers will follow it?

The absurdity applies as well to trains on the Metrolink LA area rail transit agency, which serves Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange Counties as well as LA County. Although Amtrak trains, which cover several of the same routes, are completely exempt even within LA County, the county health order does cover Metrolink trains on the same routes -- except that those routes also leave the county to reach their own destinations. So a Metrolink train to Ventura, say, will require masks until it leaves Northridge, the last station in LA County on that route, but no masks will be required for the remainder of the run to Ventura in Ventura County.

For that matter, if I ride a Metrolink train from downtown LA to Van Nuys, both stations within LA County, I must mask up -- but if I ride an Amtrak train between the same two stations, I don't need a mask. (Indeed, Amtrak will honor my Metrolink ticket on that route.) The distinction is purely political with no public health jusification.

Except that, from what I see on Facebook, Metrolink staff had informally ceased enforcement of any mask rule weeks previous even to the Florida judge's order. But in theory, if Metrolink were to reverse itself, there would be no public health reason to enforce masking on on half of a train's route, although the train would have the same people breathing the same air on both parts of the route.

But let's go a little farther. In recent months, the CDC has been extending the airline and transit mask rule piecemeal. Just a week ago, it extended that rule only until May 3 as it puzzled over the latest subvariant of COVID.

When the Transportation Security Administration, which enforces the rule for planes, buses, trains and transit hubs, extended the requirement last month, it said the CDC had been hoping to roll out a more flexible masking strategy that would have replaced the nationwide requirement.

The mask mandate is the most visible vestige of government restrictions to control the pandemic, and possibly the most controversial. A surge of abusive and sometimes violent incidents on airplanes has been attributed mostly to disputes over mask-wearing.

In the wake of the Florida judge's order, the CDC now appears to want to order the Justice Department to appeal the order simply to preserve the CDC's ability to reimpose masking in the future. But whether the airlines, Amtrak, the TSA, or anyone else will actually resume enforcement is an open question, given the cheers and applause that followed the airlines' lifting of enforcement earlier this week. Any resumption would clearly result in renewed "abusive and sometimes violent incidents on airplanes", which do nothing but damage the airlines' public image, and those would take place in an environment that was supposed to end on May 3 in any case (if, that is, you can believe the CDC).

The bottom line is that even if, on May 4, a new, even more contagious and even more fatal variant of COVID were to emerge, there would be no actual public health basis for the CDC to reimpose any of the controls from the past two years, since none, lockdowns, shuttered businesses, social distance, capacity restrictions, masking, vaccine mandates, ever actually worked.

"Dr" Ferrer is proving the point that the controls are based entirely on "because we say so". This isn't a winning strategy. Even Philadelphia figured this one out.

Plan B From Outer Space

I'm always fascinated by the continuing attempts to circumvent Fermi's Paradox, the problem that no matter how probable we calculate the existence of space aliens, they never quite show up. The latest, which is something that's actually turned up on the Science Channel in recent years, is that they're probably hiding in oceans of warm water under ammonia ice on [name a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, or maybe Pluto.] Via Instapundit, which is fond of this sort of thing, I found this:

Forget Mars—Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the most promising worlds in the solar system to look for alien life, in large part because it boasts a huge liquid ocean sitting below a sheet of ice. Although Europa is just one-fourth the diameter of Earth, its ocean may have twice as much water as our planet’s oceans combined. And where there is water, there is the chance for life as we know it to settle down.

In fact, that's the whole argument. I used to admire that talent. My father, checking my homework assignments like "write a 250 word essay on ____", would complain that I'd fallen short with only 150 words. I'd answer that was all I had to say. "No," he'd reply. "You have to expand. You have to take what you've said and expand on it, keep expanding on it", as he made a gesture like the guy who expands on the size of the fish he's caught. That was one of the lessons I learned in my childhood, that I needed to be the kind of guy who could expand on things.

They sent me to an Ivy League school and wound up immensely disappointed that I never learned to expand on things. They thought that was the kind of thing you were supposed to learn there. They were probably right. I guess they could have consoled themselves that at least when they sent me there, learning how to do that was a lot cheaper than it is now.

But I always admired people who could do that. The author of the piece in the link has that ability that I never could master. He explains,

However, it might not be as daunting as we think. A new study published in Nature Communications on Tuesday reveals that the icy shell itself might be much more porous than previously thought. In fact, the ice might be home to multiple pockets of water that could be habitable to life as well.

The key to these new findings? Greenland. New data collected with ice-penetrating radar shows the formation of “double ridge” features in the Greenland ice sheet—features that are present on Europa as well. The researchers behind the new paper believe that the mechanism for how these double ridges formed in Greenland ought to apply to Europa—which would suggest that liquid water is more present on the Jovian moon than we could have ever dreamed of.

And all you need to create life is water, right? Just get some plain ol' H2O and let it sit in a pot for about 18 gazillion years, and voilà, life! Which runs up against Fermi's Paradox, that if it's so probable, why aren't we seeing it?

Actually, I've run into a fair number of articles lately that say there's little to say on the subject, like this one:

PERTH, Australia — The quest to find alien life in the cosmos has come up empty in one of the biggest searches to date. Researchers in Australia say their latest project scanned billions of stars and 144 known exoplanets for signs of alien broadcasts — but ultimately found nothing.

Or this one:

NASA has discovered more than 5,000 planets outside of our solar system – but so far, Earth is the only one that appears to have the right conditions for human life.

NASA said it has confirmed 5,005 exoplanets – or planets outside of our solar system. Most are in a very small region outside of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And by "small," NASA means within thousands of light-years. One light year is 5.88 trillion miles.

The closest known exoplanet to Earth, Proxima Centauri b, is about four light-years away.

Here's the conundrum. NASA doesn't come right out and say that a core objective is to find alien life, but it implies it strongly in the wording of its mission statement:

NASA vision statement is “to discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity."

. . . Evidence shows that NASA has been successful in satisfaction of the first component in this vision statement. The company prides of pioneering a wide range of discoveries such as the feasibility of life in other planets. Although this is futuristic, the most impactful discoveries comprise the ones that have an immediate and direct impact on the lives of people in the contemporary era.

How has NASA demonsrated "the feasibility of life in other planets?" Its own studies like the one linked just above suggest that gosh darn it, no matter how hard we look, we can't seem to find any. And how has this non-discovery had any "immediate and direct impact on the lives of people"? Well, I guess if you look at NASA's payroll, and the university payrolls supported by NASA grants, I guess you could say so. NASA's brought up generations of people who are able to expand on things.

Heck, some of them have gotten rich.

Potemkin Government And The Crisis Of Competence

I note a piece by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, It’s Not Just Joe Biden. The United States Has A Potemkin Government:

Joe Biden’s shameful performance at the White House Easter egg roll Sunday was another strong visual indicator that he is not really governing this country. And he’s not the only sham authority in this country — our nation is replete with them.

The term “Potemkin village” arose in Russia to describe empty buildings set up as propaganda, to give a false impression of industry and life. The fake villages were intended to hide the regime’s mass mismanagement and infliction of suffering upon its own people.

Ms Pullmann opens things up to an obvious parallel with her reference to Potemkin -- but she holds back! I did a search for "Putin" anywhere in the piece, and no such word was to be found. Yet the single point that every analyst of the Russia-Ukraine War (which I think is only a theater of the worldwide Plebe War) will agree about is that the entire Russian invasion can be characterized as incompetent, driven as far as anyone can see by an incompetent despot at the top, surrounded by incompetent yes-men.

If the US has a Potemkin government, what about the Russian Federation, whose predecessor invented the term? But the problem isn't just government. What about CNN?

Warner Bros. Discovery laid off CNN’s chief financial officer Brad Ferrer with Discovery’s current chief financial officer Neil Chugani as the media giant attempts to restructure the finance team, Axios reported Tuesday, citing five unidentified sources.

. . . While Warner Bros. Discovery moves to make CNN+, which has approximately just 150,000 subscribers, more profitable, executives within CNN see the streaming service as a possible lifeline for the network in years ahead, according to Axios. Had CNN+ been profitable, CNN’s long-term revenue would’ve increased given the boom around digital media, but things don’t seem to be turning out according to plan.

Hot Air has fujrther analysis:

There’s also a question of why CNN insisted on launching an expensive, dubious new platform so soon before the merger with Discovery. Axios claims that Discovery didn’t want to communicate internally with Warner Bros. before the deal for fear of attracting government interest, so they opted instead to say some discouraging things about CNN+ publicly in hopes that CNN would take the hint and postpone the launch. But they didn’t.

. . . The fact that WBD has now slashed marketing spending raises the possibility that they’re going to shutter it anyway, which would make this a “New Coke”-scale debacle.

But there’s another possibility, per Axios. WBD may try to bundle CNN+ with other streaming services it owns to sweeten the pot for consumers by broadening the variety of content available.

. . . HBO Max and Discovery+ alone include a lot of archived programming. Package them with a news service like CNN+ for an extra buck or two a month and cordcutters may find that hard to say no to, especially if CNN+ eventually includes CNN’s live newscast. That’s another key takeaway from Axios’s report today — WBD wants CNN to get back to hard news programming, to the point where they’re even toying with doing a traditional newscast in the 9 p.m. hour instead of bringing in a new opinion-ish host to replace Chris Cuomo. If CNN+ is already headed to the trash bin, I assume that’s where Chris Wallace will end up. But WBD may already have so much money sunk into the platform that they have to at least try to bundle it in order to recoup some of those expenses. CNN+ likely can’t survive independently, but maybe it can if it’s hooked up to HBO/Discovery life support.

In other words, the traditional corporate media and news model is falling apart. It almost sounds like Putin withdrawing from Kyiv to regroup and win the war in Donbas. But this fits with other developments in the COVID theater of the Plebe War:

Just days after President Joe Biden’s Centers for Disease Control ordered yet another extension of the federal mask mandate, a Florida judge ruled that the agency had no authority to impose it in the first place, saying that “our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.”

To public cheers, the TSA, Amtrak, the Washington Metro system, and other public transportation systems immediately ditched their mask requirements, even though the Biden administration is appealing the ruling in hopes overturning it. No one, it seems, trusts the CDC anymore.

But all of this comes as COVID cases appear to be on the upswing.

. . . So, Biden now faces a dilemma. Does he relent on mandates and get blamed for another spike in COVID cases? Or does he invite an intense hostility from a public that is sick and tired of being bossed around by the likes of Anthony Fauci?

. . . Biden and the rest of the left have been drunk on power ever since COVID hit the scene. They needlessly rushed in sweeping and destructive lockdowns, closed churches, hampered businesses, tried – illegally – to turn employers into vaccine enforcers, upended election laws at the last minute to help their friends get elected, shuttered schools, and made kids wear masks, despite the widely known harm those last two have inflicted.

And the left has given every indication that it won’t give up its newfound power willingly. Thus, the CDC announced on April 13 it was extending its federal mask mandate for another two weeks because … well, presumably because it wanted the mandate in place forever.

We may feel certain that whatever option Biden chooses, it will be about as effective as CNN or Putin. The problem is bigger than any of them individually.

If you think about it, the story abut a federal judge striking down the mask mandate for airlines and other transit yesterday was pure dog-bites-man. Federal and state courts have been doing this throughout the course of the pandemic, with at best mixed results. In September 2020, Pennsylvania federal judge William S Stickman IV struck down state COVID restrictions on businesses and assembly, but an appeals court promptly stayed the order.

This has been the story throughout the panic. The various measures imposed by governments, from lockdowns to business closures to social distancing to masking to vaccinations have all proved ineffective in curing COVID, but attempts to mitigate them via the courts have been inconclusive. The man-bites-dog in the story is that now nobody's going to try to stay Judge Kimball's ruling. It appears that the public is finally willing to accept that the pandemic is over, more or less. The airlines, which had been petitioning the CDC to drop the mask mandate, have announced they will no longer enforce it, and the TSA has followed suit at airports.

Amtrak as of today has announced,

While Amtrak passengers and employees are no longer required to wear masks while on board trains or in stations, masks are welcome and remain an important preventive measure against COVID-19. Anyone needing or choosing to wear one is encouraged to do so.

Metrolink, the Los Angeles-area rail transit agency, has announced it will no longer enforce a mask requirement, but I'd learned from a Facebook friend who took a selfie on a train without his mask last week that staff had not been enforcing the requirement for some weeks. However, most other California transit agencies say they're "waiting for guidance". In fact, this seems to be the case nationally. The impression I have, though, is that the administration won't pursue this:

An official with President Joe Biden’s administration said Monday evening that, given the ruling, the TSA would no longer enforce the mandate, which had applied to commercial aircraft, buses, trains, ferries and subway systems, as well as transportation hubs.

I noted as well last week that Philadelphia reinstituted an indoor mask requirement, but so far, no other local authority has followed suit. This is a contrast from 202l, when local agencies were quick to tighten their own restrictions in response to similar moves elsewhere but reluctant to loosen them when the variouis waves peaked.

Individual choices are lagging behind official relaxations. Although outdoor masking rules in Los Angeles have been gone for many months, ordinary people wearing masks on the street are still common, and although indoor masking hasn't been required since February, I would estimate that roughly half those attending Easter mass wore masks. On the other hand, we're at least back to shaking hands with our friends at the peace.

It looks, though, like we're in the final stages of the 2020 moral panic.

The Trans Conundrum

Here's what I can't figure out. President Biden, facing some of the lowest poll numbers of any president ever at this point in his term, has made transsexualism a signature issue, notwithstanding it's deeply unpopular even with people who are same-sex attracted:

“There is a large body of silent opinion among gay men and many lesbians that deeply believes in [biological] sex differences, cherishes and celebrates the male and female bodies, and does not see gayness as connected to transgender experience,” gay rights author Andrew Sullivan wrote. “Gay happiness depends on our owning our own [male or female biological] sex, not denying it.”

. . . The transgender ideology insists that government should deny the importance of biology in shaping people’s politics and personal lives.

Instead, transgenderism asserts that government should champion each person’s chosen sense of “gender” — which is defined as their sense of feeling male or female.

. . . The focus on feelings also gives status-seeking K-12 teachers a righteous excuse to groom an effeminate young boy or an insecure girl (who may or may not grow up to be gay or lesbian) towards a transgender identity, complete with a lifetime of sterilizing drugs, surgeries, loneliness, and poor health.

The transgender view also creates a lucrative opportunity for drug companies, doctors, and surgeons to feel virtuous about reshaping children’s or teenagers’ bodies to mimic the appearance of the opposite sex, regardless of the trauma and damage being done to children.

This suggests the actual voters and financial support for transgender aren't young teens who may be struggling with identity -- after all, they're too young to vote -- but a growing culture of elites who profit from a problem they themselves create, indeed by telling the children and young teens what their problem is. By the same token, the movement to conceal from the parents of the children and young teens that they're being counseled to transition, and indeed may be receiving medical treatment for a perceived condition without the parents' consent, is an indication that there is nothing spontaneous or voluntary about transsexualism. It's programmed by people with a hidden agenda.

What's the underlying agenda? It probably isn't actually related to pedophilia or same-sex atrraction; the point being made by gay and lesbian activists is that they happen to be attracted to members of their own sex for sexual reasons, however disordered that may be from the standpoint of natural law. Gender dysphoria is being sold as an entirely different problem with an entirely different solution.

In fact, the solutions appear to be different based on the age of the patient. Post-pubescent men, even if they undergo hormone treatments, almost always retain their full sexual equipment and frequently appear to continue to have sexual relations with women; witness the trans men who sue to be incarcerated in women's prisons and then get the women inmates pregnant.

On the other hand, a prepubescent boy who is convinced by his teachers and counselors that he's trans is a candidate for puberty blockers and further treatment, including castration. Why?

Clearly the motivation behind this isn't being fully examined given the current state of the public dialogue. I would imagine that some part of the agenda is depopulation, but this would require a significant number of young males to be sterilized, and it's far from clear that even the most enthusiastic campaign of mass grooming can accomplish this.

But if the object is vastly to increase the number of castrated men, this could also have implications simply for keeping the overall population docile.

Another motive couid be antifeminism, to erase any idea of a separate female identity by in effect making females a version of males and perhaps eventually wiping them out once a more controllable means of reproduction can be devised -- recall that in the TV series Fringe, the Observers, technologically enhanced humanoids from the future, are an all-male race that is able to reproduce in an unspecified way. The fantasy, if nothing else, is out there.

The most we can say is that one of the least popular presidents in US history has made transsexualism a signature issue and claimed transsexuals are made in God's image. As battles in the Plebe War go, this is going to turn out about as well as the encirclement of Kyiv.

Defeat In Detail

I'm scratching my head. Throughout the Ukraine war, the phrase "defeat in detail" has been more or less entering my random thoughts before I fall asleep at night, proobably because I've always assumed it was generally recognized as a key to Ukraine's strategy in the current war. A quick and easy definition is at Encyclopedia.com:

DEFEAT IN DETAIL. In the correct military sense—in the twenty-first as well as in the eighteenth century—this term means "the defeat in turn of the separated parts of a force." To avoid "defeat in detail," a commander keeps all his units within "supporting distance" of each other.

The standard examples (as the one in the video above) include Napoleon's Piedmont campaign and the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg. Another less-cited example, which might be better from my point of view, would be Washington's overall strategy in the Revolution (which I believe Cornwallis himself conceded was a success using that term). But one that fits the definition in Encyclopedia.com even more closely is the current Ukraine strategy in the war with Russia.

The conventional wisdom so far has been that Ukraine's victory in the Battle of Kyiv is an entirely different matter from the putative upcoming battle in Donbas, in which the Russians will be (and this is never completely clear) either Gen Manstein or Gen Zhukhov and smash Ukraine with overwhelming numbers of tanks. Whichever, it's gonna be a big Russian victory or something.

This is in spite of what strikes me as the completely uncontroversial conclusion by the Institute for the Study of War that the forces Russia is trying to recommit to eastern Ukraine "remain degraded, and Russian forces will face challenges integrating units from several military districts into a cohesive fighting force".

In addition, the separate assessments at the Militaryland.com site contain remarks like, "The convoy of Russian army have been moving towards Izium for the third day, and it’s kinda a déjà vu to the Kyiv one." In general, the Russian strategy, insofar as a coherent one even exists, hasn't changed since Kyiv, and in fact, what we're actually seeing on YouTube videos and other press reports is a steady stream of small battles in both the Donetsk and Kherson regions like this one:

Military personnel of the Joint Forces successfully repulsed 6 attacks by the Russians and terminated 15 units of military hardware belonging to the aggressors on the Donetsk and Luhansk fronts on 14 April.

"On 14 April, Ukrainian defenders destroyed 4 tanks, 6 armoured personnel carriers, 4 infantry fighting vehicles and one artillery system belonging to the enemy."

Footage from what may be either this encounter or any number of similar ones on YouTube indicates that this sort of action, taken against a single column of Russian vehicles, amounts to destroying the combat effectivenss of an individual battalion tactical group, apparently dispatched independently and without supoport from others. Estimates of the number of BTGs in eastern Ukraine are from 35 to 50, and as the ISW keeps pointing out, these are already understrength and degraded. The Oryx site continues to catalog the destruction, abandonment, and capture of dozens of tanks, armored vehicles, and weapons each day. As of this morning, its number of such on the Russian side is 2899, and there's apparently a backlog in counting. The Russians are repeating the same failures but expecting a different result.

What we're actually seeing in eastern Ukraine and Kherson is simply a continuation of the Ukrainian strategy we saw in Kyiv, which is misreported as a "stalemate" punctuated by minor skirmishes -- until, unexpectedly, the Russians collapse and retreat in disorder.

Ukraine has so far been able tactically to push back the Russian invasion in detail, in effect a battalion tactical group at a time. Strategically, it's generally acknowledged that the Russian invasion relied on multiple separated parts of a force that were in fact not in supporting distance of each other, which so far has enabled the Ukraine resistance on both small scale and large.

I did a web search on "Ukraine" and "defeat in detail" and came up with only 534,000 hits, most of which date from before the current war. They threw me out of ROTC.

The Sinking Of The Moskva

News reports confirm that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea was hit by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and heavily damaged; other reports on Twitter say that it has sunk. Meanwhile,

Rumors are swirling in Russia about Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu having suffered a massive heart attack.

Leonid Nevzlin, a former co-head of the oil giant Yukos, claims that Shoigu is in critical condition.

He also says that 20 top generals have been arrested. pic.twitter.com/9kOJ1Ba0dx

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 14, 2022

The Institute for the Study of War site has made no mention of the damage or sinking of the Moskva, nor has the Militaryland site, although I first saw references to this in the middle of yesterday afternoon. The Oryx site, however, has already confirmed the damage, though not the subsequent sinking. It's hard to imagine that this is not a significant blow to Russian prestige: in response to Sweden and Finland moving to NATO, the Russian response was to threaten them with naval forces:

#Russia will strengthen its borders in case of #Sweden and #Finland join #NATO and will deploy "significant naval forces" in the waters of the Gulf of Finland.

This was stated by Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. pic.twitter.com/nEQaZU3l1K

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) April 14, 2022

The most complete coverage is at the Red State blog, which itself is a surprise, as US independent media hasn't had much interest in Ukraine. I think the story there has made a correct call:

The politics of the sinking of the Moskva will be seismic. The Moskva is the ship that called upon Ukrainian troops on Snake Island to surrender during the early days of the war and received the memorable response “Russian warship…go f*** yourself” and had a Ukrainian postage stamp designed in honor of the event.

I'm inclined to wait for other developments.

So, Are The Neocons Back?

I've been more closely following retired Gen Jack Keane, a frequent Fox talking head, since I discoverd he's the Chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, which I've been discussing lately. The ISW is pretty clearly a neoconservative think tank, and while its assessments of the Russo-Ukraine War have been remarkably obtuse, there can be little question that it's in frequent contact with generals who are in the Pentagon policy loop. But now Gen Keane in the video above is suggesting the Pentagon policy loop isn't necessarily the White House policy loop. In response to sound bites from Pentagon spokesman John Kirby saying, "We want the Ukrainians to win this war". Keane says,

... really the first time we've heard that from the administration, I'm actually convinced, I mean that's where the Pentagon leaders actually feel, but Secretary Blinken avoids the subject, the national security adviser does the same, and certainly the President of the United States does the same. I was very encouraged by the prime minister of the UK going to Kyiv this weekend . . .

Oddly, this is echoed by a story on Summit News:

A French journalist who returned from Ukraine after arriving with volunteer fighters told broadcaster CNews that Americans are directly “in charge” of the war on the ground.

The assertion was made by Le Figaro senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot.

Malbrunot said he had accompanied French volunteer fighters, two of whom had previously fought against ISIS.

“I had the surprise, and so did they, to discover that to be able to enter the Ukrainian army, well it’s the Americans who are in charge,” said Malbrunot.

Adding that he and the volunteers “almost got arrested” by the Americans, who asserted they were in charge, the journalist then revealed that they were forced to sign a contract “until the end of the war.”

“And who is in charge? It’s the Americans, I saw it with my own eyes,” said Malbrunot, adding, “I thought I was with the international brigades, and I found myself facing the Pentagon.”

Citing a French intelligence source, Malbrunot also tweeted that British SAS units “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did the American Deltas.”

Russia is apparently well aware of the “secret war” being waged in Ukraine by foreign commandos who have been in the region since February.

Both the United States and the UK have publicly asserted that there won’t be “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, but apparently there has been a US-UK military presence since the start of the war.

Certainly we've seen a resurgence of neocon opinion recently, with the ISW the most prestigious source of Russo-Ukraine war analysis, however obtuse, opaque, and noncommittal it may be; Eliot Cohen a marquee writer at The Atlantic; and even Francis Fukuyama, 30 years after declaring history ended, inexplicably giving it and his career a jump start. Let's step back to Wikipedia's discussion of neoconservatism:

Neoconservatism is a political movement that was born in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the Vietnam protests. Some also began to question their liberal beliefs regarding domestic policies such as the Great Society. Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, including peace through strength, and are known for espousing disdain for communism and political radicalism.

. . . Many of its adherents became politically influential during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, peaking in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

. . . The Bush Doctrine was greeted with accolades by many neoconservatives. When asked whether he agreed with the Bush Doctrine, Max Boot said he did and that "I think [Bush is] exactly right to say we can't sit back and wait for the next terrorist strike on Manhattan. We have to go out and stop the terrorists overseas. We have to play the role of the global policeman. ... But I also argue that we ought to go further". Discussing the significance of the Bush Doctrine, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol claimed: "The world is a mess. And, I think, it's very much to Bush's credit that he's gotten serious about dealing with it. ... The danger is not that we're going to do too much. The danger is that we're going to do too little.

. . . Barack Obama campaigned for the Democratic nomination during 2008 by attacking his opponents, especially Hillary Clinton, for originally endorsing Bush's Iraq-war policies. Obama maintained a selection of prominent military officials from the Bush Administration including Robert Gates (Bush's Defense Secretary) and David Petraeus (Bush's ranking general in Iraq).

. . . Several neoconservatives played a major role in the Stop Trump movement in 2016, in opposition to the Republican presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, due to his criticism of interventionist foreign policies, as well as their perception of him as an "authoritarian" figure. Since Trump took office, some neoconservatives have joined his administration, such as Elliott Abrams. Neoconservatives have supported the Trump administration's hawkish approach towards Iran and Venezuela, while opposing the administration's withdrawal of troops from Syria and diplomatic outreach to North Korea. Although neoconservatives have served in the Trump administration, they have been observed to have been slowly overtaken by the nascent populist and national conservative movements, and to have struggled to adapt to a changing geopolitical atmosphere.

Biden's precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan must certainly be seen as a final rejection of Bush-era neoconservative and interventionist policies -- except that it's not hard to conclude that Biden's implicit rejection of those policies encouraged Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

So is the Pentagon reverting to neoconservatism? Are the lizard people running the country reverting to a containment consensus more like Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes, sponsoring proxy wars against the successor to the Soviet Union? They and the Pentagon are likely running an implicit version of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher alliance in Ukraine, with the Thatcher surrogate in the UK, but so far without Biden playing Reagan. Biden, though, is preoccupied at best.

My bet is Gen Keane is in the loop, but President Brandon is not.