The End Stages Of The COVID Moral Panic

I'm seeing a certain amount of defeatism over Ukraine's predicament, from sources ranging from the never-Trump Red State site to the UK YouTuber demirep/granniopteryx. Part of this, I think, is the difficulty some people are having getting their heads around the bigger picture.

For instrance, as the meme above suggests, I think the short-lived Canadian state of "emergency" and Putin's invasion of Ukraine are two symptoms of a bigger trend, the closing window of opportunity that had existed during the COVID moral panic. Let's recall that the short-lived "emergency" Trudeau declared was layered upon state after state of "emergency" already declared by federal governments, provinces, states, counties, cities, towns, and local health departments in North America and everywhere else throughout the COVID panic, which as we speak are still being overtaken (or not) by events.

For instance, the US Senate voted just yesterday 48-47 to cancel the US COVID national "state of emergency". Almost certainly the House will defeat an equivalent motion there, and President Brandon's handlers will ignore it anyhow, but it's an indication of where things are headed, if not today, if not next month, if not next year, then one day. I never thought this was going to be a quick or easy battle.

And let's keep iin mind that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is also a delayed outcome of the COVID panic, since one of its early effects was the election of Biden under conditions imposed by various "emergencies" that inevitably affected the vote and have left a continuing taste of illegitimacy to his presidency. Even the transhumanist Hefnerian Glenn Reynolds noted this morning, “This is what happens when you order a President through the mail."

I don't think anyone can seriously disagree that with the 2022 midterms looming and the US political climate likely to change, Putin saw the coming months as his last window for an invasion -- but with his tanks bogged down in Ukrainian mud as of February, was this a Hitler-size miscalculation based on the imperatives of the calendar?

In fact, I see reasons to agree with Reynolds on his current view of the overall problem:

The world is facing its biggest political/military crisis since the end of the Cold War, and for better or worse, the leadership of its largest countries has serious problems. Probably for worse.

Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, seems angry and out of touch.

. . . Here in the United States, meanwhile, we have leadership problems of our own. President Joe Biden managed to stumble his way through an uninspired State of the Union address in which he confused Ukrainians and Iranians, but he has shown no signs of being capable of the kind of leadership we need.

. . . Everybody knows this, and Democrats aren’t happy about it, but removing Joe wouldn’t help as Vice President Kamala Harris seems to be no improvement.

. . . Behind her in the presidential succession line is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who isn’t looking much better. And as she prepares to turn 82, the likelihood that Pelosi would bring fresh energy to the presidency is low.

(And it’s not just age. We need only look north to Canada to see Justin Trudeau — known to some as Prime Minister Zoolander — demonstrate that the trademark mixture of ineptitude and thuggishness can start young.)

Only in Europe do we see, surprisingly, glimmers of more sensible behavior, as fear of a Russian invasion concentrates the minds of leaders there.

The truth is, throughout the past two years of COVID panic, we’ve seen that the world’s leadership class isn’t up to the task. Now, facing a major diplomatic crisis, we have to hope it will do better. Hope and maybe pray a little.

The leadership class was given a pass -- or more accurately, gave themselves a pass -- due to the COVID panic. The window there is simply closing; faux emergencies no longer cut it in the face of real ones. But I started this blog on the basis of a belief that institutions are resilient, while I understood that it's a struggle for them to regain their effectiveness even so.

I think this is playing itself out now, although as we saw in the crises leading up to World War II, it took time for ineffective leadership to leave the scene and more effective leaders to rise to the occasion.

More On Zelensky As Rhetorician

A writer for Red State, a never-Trump Salem Media outlet has nevertheless recognized the real merit of Zelensky's March 2 address to Ukraine, calling it "the greatest speech of our era", which is not empty hyperbole. He went to the effort of transcribing much of it from the subtitles on the screen:

During this war, we have had more unity than for over thirty years before. At first, we were equally scared, then we felt equally painful, and now we do not care. Except for victory. Except for the truth. Except for peace. Except for the tranquility we want to achieve. Except for the lives of our people, for when we are worried. Except for Ukraine. During this time, we have truly become one. We forgave each other a lot. We started loving each other. We help each other. We are worried for each other.

Yesterday morning on Freedom Square we were all Kharkiv residents. Then the enemy destroyed us all by striking at residential buildings in Borodyanka. We were all bombed in Kyiv last night. And we all died again in Babyn Yar — in a missile strike.

Although the whole world promises constantly “never again,” for any normal person who knows history, Babyn Yar is a special place of Kyiv. A special part of history. A special part of Europe. A place of prayer. A place of remembrance for the hundred thousand people killed by the Nazis. The place of old Kyiv cemeteries. Who should you be to make it a target for missiles? You are killing Holocaust victims for the second time.

uring the Soviet era, a TV center was built on the bones there and also a sports complex. Outbuildings. They built a park there. To erase the true history of Babyn Yar. But why was it bombed? This is beyond humanity. Such a missile strike shows that, for many people in Russia, our Kyiv is completely foreign. They know nothing about our capital. About our history. But they have an order to erase our history. Erase our country. Erase us all.

On the first day of the war, Uman was brutally bombed. Where hundreds of thousands of Jews come every year to pray. Then — Babyn Yar, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were executed.

I am now addressing all the Jews of the world — don’t you see what is happening? That is why it is very important that millions of Jews around the world do not remain silent right now. Nazism is born in silence. So, shout about the killings of civilians. Shout about the killings of Ukrainians. Last night and tonight, they continued to bomb our cities. Bombs. Missiles. Artillery. Machine guns. Targeting peaceful people. Again. Targeting residential areas. Again. Mariupol. Kharkiv. Kyiv. Zhytomyr. And other cities and towns of Ukraine. This cannot be explained by any human reason. Any reason of God.

What other military facilities threaten Russia? What other “NATO bases”? Saint Sophia Cathedral? Larva? St. Andrew’s Church? Whatever they dream of there — damn them! Because God is with us!

Think of this number: almost six thousand Russians, died. Russian military, in six days of war. This is without counting the losses of the enemy last night. Six thousand. To get what? Get Ukraine? It is impossible.

My dears, the time will come when we will be able to sleep. But it will be after the war. After the victory. In a peaceful country, as we need. Which we have always appreciated. And which we have never destroyed.

I ask all of you to take care of your loved ones. Take care of your brothers-in-arms. I admire you! The whole world admires you. From Hollywood stars to politicians. Today you, Ukrainians, are a symbol of invincibility. A symbol that people in any country can become the best people on earth at any moment.

Glory to Ukraine!

A speech from today continues his carefuly embedded theme expanding the narrative of Ukraine's independent history and equating Putin's invasion of 2022 with Hitler's invasion of 1941. As many know, World War II was called in the Soviet Union and presumably is still called in successor countries the "Great Patriotic War". (My transcription from subtitles):

[The occupiers] will remember what the patriotic war is.

Yes, for us it is a patriotic war.

We remember how patriotic wars begin.

And we know how they end. For the invaders.

Our army is doing everything to break the enemy completely. Almost nine thousand Russians were killed! In one week! In the Mikolaiv direction invaders have to take away the "two hundred" and "three hundred" with tens of helicopters. 19 years, 20 years [old]. . . What did they see in life, apart from this invasion? But most of them remain everywhere.

Ukraine does not want to be covered with military corpses. Go home. Your whole army. Tell your commanders that you want to live. Not to die. To live.

The war must be stopped and peace returned as soon as possible.

Today was, as usual, an active day of negotiations with the leaders of the member states of our anti-war coalition. I held talks with the heads of government of Norway and Israel. With the President of Kazakhstan. With the Emir of Qatar, Tamin Bin Hamad Al Thani. With the President of the European Council, Charles Michel. With Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. With President of Poland, Andrejs Duda.

Brilliant Result at the UN General Assembly. 141 countries supported the resolution, which calls on Russia to withdraw troops from Ukraine immediately. 141 states stand for us! And for Russia -- only four states that voted against. Here is the list: North Korea, Eritrea, Syria, and Belarus. This is the list. These are the friends. And there will be no others for the state that does not know how to live in peace.

Today I held a meeting with the heads of regions and cities in Ukraine. The new head of the Odesa regional state administration is already working. Maksym Marchenko. Military professional. Our guys on the ground are working hard to organize "green corridors". To take out civilians. To bring medicine. Volhovaka. Cities of the Kyiv, Sumy, Kharkhiv regions, south of Ukraine. This is very difficult. Extremely difficult.

We are opposed by terror. But terror loses. Thanks to our heroes. Today I signed a decree awarding the title Hero of Ukraine to fifteen of our defenders. . .

He goes on to list the fifteen individuals, mostly given the awards posthumously, with their particular exploits. Elsewhere, he said,

'They wanted to destroy us. They failed. We've been through so much. And if anyone thinks that, having overcome all this, Ukrainians will be frightened, broken or surrender, they know nothing about Ukraine,' Zelensky said, adding: 'We will restore every house, every street, every city and we say to Russia: learn the word 'reparations'.

'You will reimburse us for everything you did against our state, against every Ukrainian, in full.'

'We are a people who in a week have destroyed the plans of the enemy,' he said. 'They will have no peace here. They will have no food. They will have here not one quiet moment.'

This guy is turning into a figure comparable to Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle.

Why Can't We Have President Zelensky?

I've seen the occasional remark that someone would rather have had President Zelensky deliver the US State of the Union than President Brandon, but actually going a little farther, it seems like we'd do better with Zelensky in the Oval Office on a day to day basis as well. He isn't native born, but on the other hand, based on what I hear, his English is better than President Brandon's. Maybe there's a loophole.

The simultaneous translation of the speech above, an address to Ukraine on the morning of the war's seventh day, has Churchillian echoes, not least because it's utterly without bombast. He's speaking realistically about the situation on the ground and making the entirely justified observation that the Russian invasion has unified Ukraine the most it's been in 30 years, given the country a national purpose and national consciousness, and indeed acknowledging the place of Jews in that national identity. It's a piece of rhetoric well worth study.

I also get the sense that he feels like they've turned the corner. Western military observers have been reluctant to declare victory, but from the start, they've noted that Putin failed to occupy major cities within 48 to 72 hours. A few suggested Putin had already lost the war just on that basis; others said he'd lose if Ukraine holds out for ten days. As of this morning, it's been seven, and they'll pretty clearly make it to ten.

The anaysis I'm seeing is that the 40-mile long convoy that's been "looming" near Kyiv is a stalled line of logistical equipment carrying fuel, food, and ammunition for tanks, but this can't reach the tanks and is slowly being picked off by Ukrainian drones, infantry, and guerillas. I see other estimates that Russia has committed about 80% of the 190,000 troops that had been massed at the Ukraine border, with no result. Yet other observers ask why Russian bombers, which could discharge cruise missiles into Ukraine from Russian territory, haven't done so, and the answer appears to be that the Russians have run out of cruise missiles.

So right now, two of the three most powerful world leaders appear incompetent, feckless, even delusional, and they're both being badly outclassed by a former standup comic at the head of a third-rate power. Heck, I'll bet there are Canadians who are jealous, too.

Focus Shifts Back To Biden

With the US trucker convoy in Washington as President Biden is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address, the US media, at least, has shifted its attention back to Washington, although US media reporting on Ukraine has been bad across the spectrum anyhow, legacy or independent, left or right. A few things have been lost in the confusion, such as the remarkable sequence above in which Biden has no answer to the question of whether he underestimated Putin and variously smirks, stares blankly, and picks his teeth.

The establishment media figure George Stephanopoulos asked Press Secretary Psaki over the weekend about Biden's mental capacity:

"The president is approaching his State of the Union in a pretty difficult political position right now, 37% approval rating, Democrats trailing badly in the midterm polling," Stephanopoulos said. "A majority in our recent poll out this morning even question the president’s mental capacity. How is he going to turn that around on Tuesday night? And how much has his State of the Union been changed by this war in Ukraine?"

Psaki did not respond to accusations on Biden’s mental capacity but instead focused on Biden’s State of the Union address.

I continue to think that whatever Biden's problems, they aren't a result of any medical conditon but instead, they're a result of being dumb as a rock. In the video clip, you can see his sheer exasperation at the idea of anyone questioning his judgment over Putin, to the point that this shouldn't even warrant an answer. But right now, he's in the same boat with Putin himself, with former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice saying,

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears "erratic" and is "descending" into something she’s never personally seen before.

"He was always calculating and cold. But this is different. He seems erratic. There is an ever-deepening, delusional rendering of history, it was always a kind of victimology about what had happened to them, but now it goes back to blaming Lenin for the foundation of Kyiv … in Ukraine," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."

Rice has met with Putin at least a half a dozen times across her career and said he is "descending into something I haven’t personally seen before."

The problem right now is that with the former standup comic Zelensky turning into the most charismatic figure on the world stage, people seem to be looking for ways to bypass both Biden and Putin. Clearly the EU, NATO, and even neutrals like Sweden and Switzerland, forced to recognize the Russian threat, suddenly realized they had to act independently of the US and get ahead of the problem.

The political hot button with the truckers' convoy in Washington is going to be the price of fuel. I've noted that increasing fuel prices is central to the leftist agenda, and it looks like Biden will continue his existing policies of discouraging domestic production and allowing Russia to increase prices. This hasn't gone unnoticed.

The US has mostly followed the EU in its sanctions, but Biden has left one thing in Vladimir Putin’s pockets — American energy purchases. “It’s ridiculous, totally ridiculous,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) declared yesterday, that “we’re buying over 600,000 barrels a day of crude from Russia.” Manchin wants an immediate end to such purchases — and more importantly, an immediate plan to increase American production to return to self-sufficiency.

But it isn't going to happen.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. needs to decrease its reliance on foreign oil by switching over to renewable energy, not increasing domestic production.

"We need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, on oil in general, and we need to look at other ways of having energy in our country and others," Psaki said during an interview with ABC This Week Sunday. "We've seen over the last week or so... a number of European countries are recognizing they need to reduce their own reliance on Russian oil."

So the response to the US truckers' convoy is going to be let them buy electric cars. This will set up a confrontation. The problem for Biden before the State of the Union is that every time he opens his mouth it's a disaster, but it's a disaster even when he keeps his mouth shut.

The real problem isn't in Ukraine.

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.