Out Of Momentum

Over the past few days, a consensus has begun to emerge that the Russian attempt to encircle the Ukrainian army in Donbas has stalled. For whatever reason, nobody is using the Clausewitzian term they'd been using around Kyiv, "culimination", but it seems pretty clear from the discussion that Clausewitz would say the Russian attack has culminated without reaching its objective. For instance, the BBC reports,

Russian forces are not making "the sort of strategic breakthrough" they have been looking for in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, Justin Bronk - a research fellow from UK security think tank Rusi - tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

He says Russia continues to gain a few kilometres in some areas but their forces are taking "very heavy losses" and "may be out of momentum".

The 1945 site, which I'd linked just the other day for its pessimistic appraisal of Ukraine's chances in Donbas, has changed its tune:

When Russia redeployed tens of thousands of armored troops from the environs north of Kyiv and Sumy last month to the northern shoulder of the Donbas front, there was concern that the added manpower would produce an armored breakthrough of Ukraine’s lines. However, after almost three weeks of fighting, the Ukrainian troops have held the line.

Russia’s failure to affect [sic] a breakthrough represents a noteworthy accomplishment for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF). Whether that initial success can carry Ukraine to an ultimate victory will depend on how several key factors play out in the coming weeks and months.

. . . Russian military authorities likely expected to achieve a breakthrough in the northern shoulder of Ukraine’s defenses in the Donbas by this point – and failed. The reason is that Ukrainian troops continue to exceed expectations on the ground and Russian troops underperform (from inadequate/poor tactical pre-war training). In practical terms, however, the UAF’s successful defense results from the elaborate defenses Kyiv had ordered in the years since 2014.

The defenses in the Donbas include concrete bunkers, mutually-reinforcing positions, interlocking fields of fire, anti-tank mines, and pre-sited artillery targets on likely Russian avenues of approach. These defensive works and schemes have inflicted significant harm to attacking Russian troops and have been primarily responsible for preventing any penetrations thus far.

By far the best observer of the Ukraine war is Col Markus Reisner, who holds a PhD and is on the faculty of the Austrian military academy. I've linked another of his YouTube presentations here already. This one is on the current, Donbas phase of the war. My German is pretty good, but his is fast and technical, and I had to rely on both German and English subtitles to keep up with his full meaning.

A full English translation is available here, although it doesn't really carry the clarity of the German version. A few highlights:

The decisive phase then began just about mid-April and that was the attempt by the Russian side to encircle Ukraine's forces along the line of contact. There were two options: An encirclement in depth, following the Dnieper, or a short encirclement. In the last few days we have been seeing this short encirclement, where they are trying to encircle these Ukrainian forces with a northern pincer grip and force deployment and a southern pincer as well as force deployment.

Now, at the beginning of May, this Russian attack is obviously not taking the course that was expected. . . . The first factor is the terrain itself. . . . Looking at the terrain, we can see that, firstly, the Ukrainian side has set itself up in several defense lines staggered in depth. . . . The next terrain factor that limits the Russian side concerns vegetation and terrain structure. You can see it very well here: it took the Russians a while to be able to move out of this area, which is forested and also has a river flowing through it, in order to then develop the northern pincer grip [.]

As a second factor, let's now look at the forces and compare them. . If we look at the situation in the possible encirclement, we see a ratio of 48 to 68 battalions. This means that the ratio the attacker needs - namely 1:4 - is not met by the Russian side. This is because on closer examination one finds that the forces are roughly equal and the Ukrainian side also has the advantage that its forces are massively entrenched.

Another factor is time. In order to be able to develop an operation quickly and purposefully, it is quite crucial to act quickly. It was here where the problem of the Russians was, if you think back to the terrain: that they needed time at the beginning to be able to move out of the difficult terrain, to get ready for the attack, which was planned to take place southwards. . . . The first attack by the Russians was repelled. So it took some time before the Russian side was able to conduct an envelopment through this forested area, which is actually not suitable for the deployment of mechanised forces[.]

Let's recall that the retired US general talking heads kept insisting weeks ago that the terrain in Donbas was not like around Kyiv, it was instead open country, like Kansas, good for tanks and maneuver! But just looking at the YouTube videos of Ukrainian ambushes in Donbas made it plain this wasn't the case. Col Reisner continues,

The next factor that is decisive is information. The Russian side is constantly trying to create a common operational picture regarding the deployment of the Ukrainian forces. UAVs, in particular, are being used for this purpose. Time and again, the Ukrainian forces manage to shoot down these UAVs, such as the "Orlan-10" system, which makes it difficult for the Russians to actually create a common operational picture and, above all, to use their own combat support - i.e. artillery - effectively. . . . Only after . . . preparatory artillery fire they try to advance slowly with mechanised forces, supported by infantry. Of course, this brings the challenge that the surviving Ukrainian forces can attack the Russians again and again with anti-tank weapons.

Finally, he explains the actual historical parallel with the Battle of Kursk, which unintentionally refutes the retired US generals in their assessment that the terrain and the tactical situaiton benefited the Russians:

. . . . After this description of the situation, I would like to take a brief look at the past and try to use a historical example to draw conclusions about how this situation may develop in the coming days and weeks. The fact is that in the same area in 1943 there was already a battle of encirclement, namely the famous Battle of Kursk - the German "Citadel" operation that took place north of Kharkiv. Here, the Soviet side held a bulge towards the west and the German side tried to encircle the Soviet forces in a pincer movement from the north and from the south.

The situation today is very similar: south of Kharkiv we also have a bulge, this time formed by the Ukrainian side, towards the east and the Russian side is trying to encircle the Ukrainian forces in two pincer movements from the north and from the south. If we look at the outcome of the Battle of Kursk in 1943, historians agree that there were essentially three factors that decided this battle for the Soviet side. The first factor was that the Soviet side knew exactly where and at what time the German attacks would take place – due to the decoding of a German cipher machine of the type "Enigma", it is assumed.

The second factor was that the Soviet side prepared very precisely for this attack for months and set up defensive positions in the depth, especially along the flanks, to defend against the German attack. The third factor was the doggedness of the Soviet soldiers in fighting and defending against these German attacks, and in the end the German side had to stop both of these pincer movements and the Soviet side was able to decide the battle in its favour.

If we transpose this situation to the Donbass, we see that these three factors also apply here. The first factor is that the Ukrainian side obviously knows very much about the methods of the Russian attacks. The second factor is that the Ukrainian side has been preparing for years and has set up defence positions in the depth in anticipation of a Russian attack. The third factor is undoubtedly the doggedness of the Ukrainian soldiers who are defending virtually every metre of ground with the intention to attrit the Russian side so that this attack will finally fail and does not bring the success expected by the Russian side.

It's gonna be like Kursk. Right. Everyhone forgets that the outcome of Kursk was that the Germans failed to break through the Russian salient.

Finally, the Institute for the Study of War is also changing its assessments. In yesterday's report, it concludes,

Ukrainian forces captured several settlements north and east of Kharkiv in the last 24 hours, reducing the ability of Russian forces to threaten Ukraine’s second-largest city. This Ukrainian operation is developing into a successful, broader counteroffensive—as opposed to the more localized counterattacks that Ukrainian forces have conducted throughout the war to secure key terrain and disrupt Russian offensive operations. Ukrainian forces are notably retaking territory along a broad arc around Kharkiv rather than focusing on a narrow thrust, indicating an ability to launch larger-scale offensive operations than we have observed so far in the war (as Ukrainian forces predominantly retook the outskirts of Kyiv following Russian withdrawals rather than in a major counteroffensive).

The Ukrainians are consistently outperforming expectations, but in large part, that's because expectations have been unrealistically low. s

Sinko De Mayo!

Via the UK Independent,

Russia’s Admiral Makarov warship has been hit by Ukrainian missiles and burst into flames, according to Ukrainian officials.

The frigate would be Russia’s latest high-profile naval loss in a troubled campaign, coming after reports that US intelligence helped Ukraine locate and sink the Russian warship Moskva weeks ago.

The Makarov was said to have been sailing close to Snake Island in the Black Sea south of Odesa.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Anton Gerashchenko reported on his Telegram page that the Admiral Makarov was hit by a Ukrainian “Neptune” anti-ship missile. He cited Russian sources.

According to the UK Daily Mail,

Ukraine may have shot another Russian warship overnight with an MP saying one of Putin's state-of-the-art frigates is 'in trouble' in the Black Sea.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, head of the council of Odesa which houses Ukraine's largest naval base, identified the vessel on his Telegram channel this morning as the Admiral Makarov - a $500million frigate that was only commissioned five years ago.

He said the vessel ran into difficulties overnight, before reposting a report from a local news outlet suggesting it had been shot with a Ukrainian missile near Snake Island - whose defenders memorably told another warship to 'go f*** yourself' .

Unconfirmed reports suggest rescue vessels and aircraft have set off from Russia's largest Black Sea port of Sevastopol towards the site, while flight tracking data shows an American drone circling nearby.

. . . Nobody from the Ukrainian military has so-far commented on the attack, and there has been no acknowledgement from the Kremlin either.

However, the Ukrainian armed forces did add one boat to its tally of destroyed Russian equipment published today without giving further details.

The Makarov is an Admiral Grigorovich-class frigate, one of the Russian navy's newest vessels and the most state-of-the-art frigate operating in the Black Sea.

A commenter at reddit /r ukraine conflict said, "Looks like the Ukrainians celebrated Sinko de Mayo in a big way!" and that was too good for me to pass up. But the US Right continues to get this sort of thing wrong: yesterday Allahpundit at the Hot Air blog wrung his hands that if US intelligence was involved in sinking the Moskva last month, this could start World War III:

Is there some strategic benefit I’m missing to turning this into a hot war between the U.S. and Russia? Like, “the war will end much faster and with fewer casualties if we let the U.S. Air Force bomb Russian troops in the Donbas for a week”?

Between this and the leak last night about U.S. intelligence targeting Russian generals, we’re like a day away from Biden calling Putin a pussy and daring him to try something.

. . . Lately I’ve been trying to soothe my nerves about the provocations we’re engaged in by telling myself that maybe there’s something important the intel community knows about Russian capabilities that’s left them confident there’ll be no reprisal for leaving our fingerprints all over their failures. What if their nukes don’t work anymore? Or what if we’ve figured out a way to disable them remotely? There’s nothing they can do to hurt us!

It seems to me that Ukrainian performance in the first weeks of the war, whether or not US intelligence was actually pulling the strings (every indication is that it has been, but leave that aside), Ukrainian performance combined with Russia's manifold ineptitude emboldened the EU, NATO, and even the former neutrals Sweden and Finland suddenly to stand up to Putin, nuclear threats or not. The calculation appears to be that if Russia proved so incompetent in attacking a third-rate power like Ukraine, think how they'd do against even a second-rate power like Poland.

It's quite clearly become a proxy war. Another US conservative, Victor Davis Hanson, who has always struck me as overrated, recently wrung his hands over how Ukraine reminds him of the Spanish Civil War:

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

. . . Small, skilled Ukrainian teams with Javelin and Stinger missiles destroyed multimillion-dollar helicopters and armored vehicles. Cheap, armed drones are now ubiquitous on both sides. Do these relatively inexpensive arsenals presage a more decentralized brand of warfare, where handheld weapons take out relatively sophisticated tanks and helicopters? Are we back to the superiority of quantity over quality in weapons of war?

Perhaps, but whether armor and artillery prove vestigial weapons and tactics remains to be seen as the theater is now shifting to the rolling wide-open plains of Eastern Ukraine.

. . . Before Ukraine, few, if any, recent leaders of a major nuclear nation had ever seriously threatened to use nuclear weapons against either his enemies on the battlefield or those who sent help to them—not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in the wider Middle East. Now Vladimir Putin not only brags about his nuclear arsenal and tests long-range missiles but boasts about his right to use any weapon he chooses to defeat Ukraine and its suppliers.

Ukraine, like Spain, has awoken us from our false sense of security that has grown since the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, soldiers in war sometimes do deliberately flatten apartment buildings and shoot civilians en masse—whether in 1936 or 2022. And some leaders apparently now view nuclear bombs as more or less deadlier conventional weapons.

Again, Hanson's theme is the risks of "starting World War III" amid concerns of nuclear winter, and that Russia and the West are morally equivalent in this sort of war -- and he goes beyond that to repeat the conventionial wisdom that Ukraine may seem to have been winning around Kyiv, but Donbas will be a different kettle of fish. But the weeks following such dire predictions have proved it hasn't.

It's hard not to reply that, Allahpundit and Victor Davis Hanson aside, we're in fact in a proxy World War III as we speak. The one certainty is that our previous assumptions are being upended on a daily basis, and so far, the presumed US intelligence assessments are proving remarkably correct. This is oddly reassuring.

Remember Kursk?

On April 12, I commented on the conventional wisdom of the time that there would be an upcoming battle in Donbas that would be, in one opinion, the "biggest tank battle in Europe since 1943 Battle of Kursk". It would be a "knife fight", a grand contest of maneuver in which the Russians would try to cut off the Ukrainian army in pockets.

. . . After their recent defeat in the north, Russia has made some significant changes. . . . . the Russians will have a single command staff to co-ordinate and attempt to achieve a single focused and ostensibly realistic operational objective[.]

. . . the force the Russians will amass will be formidable, and with shorter and better established supply lines into Russia they may be able to avoid some of the appalling foul ups which have characterised their war so far.

As of mid-April, this decisive battle of maneuver was going to take place "within the next two weeks". It didn't happen. Instead, the daily assessments at the Institute for the Study of War basically continued along the line of the one from yesterday, May 4:

Ukrainian defenses have largely stalled Russian advances in Eastern Ukraine. Russian troops conducted a number of unsuccessful attacks in Eastern Ukraine on May 4 and were unable to make any confirmed advances. Russian forces attacking south of Izyum appear increasingly unlikely to successfully encircle Ukrainian forces in the Rubizhne area. Ukrainian forces have so far prevented Russian forces from merging their offensives to the southeast of Izyum and the west of Lyman, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk, as Russian forces likely intended.

It appears that the "unsuccessful attacks" by the Russians were met yet again with the Ukrainian rope-a-dope strategy, wiping out enough tanks and infantry from individual BTGs to take them out of action in detail.

This utterly contradicts predictions elsewhere from mid-April of what the fighting in Donbas would be like:

It should be said right upfront, however, that the task for Kyiv isn’t wholly impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult. There is a chance that the Ukrainian troops and civilian defenders could exact such a high price in blood and iron on Russia’s Donbas attack that after some extended amount of time, Russian troops withdraw on their own.

To support that path, however, requires Ukraine to understand two key realities: 1) for that strategy to successfully result in an eventual Russian withdrawal, it would take a year or more of fighting that will leave tens of thousands of additional Ukrainians dead – possibly more – and 2) there is a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available.

. . . The primary reasons Russia’s advance into Kyiv failed are that, first, they had too few troops devoted to that axis, their logistics were spread out over hundreds of kilometers from bases in Russia, and the Ukrainian defenders were able to make expert use of the urban terrain. Ukrainians could approach Russia’s armored vehicles undetected from around buildings and often attack at point-blank range.

. . . For the Kyiv axis in February, Russia’s supply lines were dangerously stretched, requiring trips of hundreds of kilometers to keep the frontline troops supplied with sufficient food, fuel, and ammunition. For the Donbas fight, Russia has very short logistics lines, as nearly all the resupply comes directly from Russia and through friendly territory.

But it's increasingly plain that the outcome for Russia has been precisely the same in Donbas as it was around Kyiv. The normative battle has continued to be a skirmish, a Ukrainian ambush on a Russian column in generally open territory:

This continues to be a strategy of defeat in detail. For every such ambush I see each day on YouTube, I shake my head and ask how long Russia can sustain such losses, and I have to keep reminding myselt that with defeat in detail, that's the whole point. The strategy is a series of individual ambushes. What the Russians woulda-coulda-shoulda done to avoid them is beside the point, they happened.

It's beginning to look like what happened around Kyiv is repeating itself around Kharkiv and Izyum: in the end stage around Kyiv, the talking heads were speaking of "culmination", with the Russian advances stalled and tentative Ukrainian counterattacks beginning -- but within days, the Russians retreated completely. At this stage in Donbas, the same conditions exist, although nobody seems to mention "culmination", even though it's just as accurate there. I think there will be an equivalent retreat from Kharkiv and Izyum.

As of yesterday, President Zelensky's appraisal of the war was reported below:

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has named three stages of the war with Russia.

The statement came in a video address to the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The first of them is to stop Russia's advance, which, according to the president, Ukrainians have already done. The second phase is to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory. Work to this end is now ongoing. And the third is to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine as much as possible.

Now the priority for Ukraine is to push Russian troops back to the positions they were in as of February 24 and to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Zelensky has in other words stated that Ukraine has completely stopped the Russian advances on all axes, with which commentators like the ISW are in general agreement. The statements on restoring Ukraine's territorial inmtegrity have also been interpreted as an abandonment of any negotiating strategy short of that to end the war.

All this contravenes the defeatist conventional wisdom we'd been hearing just weeks ago suggesting, as above, that a fight in Donbas would represent "a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available."

Overtaken by events.

The CDC Doubles Down

Amid everything else in yesterday's news, my main interest was in finding whether the CDC would extend its rule requiring masks on aircraft and public transportation yet again after the latest extension expired on May 3. Indeed, they did.

U.S. health officials on Tuesday restated their recommendation that Americans wear masks on planes, trains and buses, despite a court ruling last month that struck down a national mask mandate on public transportation.

Americans age 2 and older should wear a well-fitting masks while on public transportation, including in airports and train stations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended, citing the current spread of coronavirus and projections of future COVID-19 trends.

For months, the Transportation Security Administration had been enforcing a requirement that passengers and workers wear masks.

The government had repeatedly extended the mandate, and the latest one had been set to expire May 3. But a federal judge in Florida struck down the rule on April 18. The same day, the TSA said it would no longer enforce the mandate.

The CDC asked the Justice Department to appeal the decision, which the department did. On Tuesday, CDC officials declined to comment on the status of the appeal. DOJ officials did not immediately respond to a request for information.

As far as I'm aware, Los Angeles County via a health department order is the only jurisdiction that is at least theoretically requiring masks on public transit, although the TSA is not enforcing the CDC rule at County airports or rail transit stations. As I've discussed here, the Metrolink rail transit agency had ceased enforcement even before the judge's April 18 order. I'd heard some agencies in the New York area were still enforcing mask rules, but New Jersey Transit's current policy is:

At this time, there are no plans to extend the mask mandate on board vehicles now that the federal mandate has expired. However, masks remain optional, and we encourage all those who wish to continue to wear them to do so if that provides for a more comfortable travel experience.

However, the federal mandate has actually been renewed, but clearly New Jersey Transit has decided to act as if it hasn't. My respect for New Jersey has increased. Nevertheless,

A number of commuters who use the rails to get to and from work -- or wherever -- each day say NJ Transit should make at least one car available only to people who still want to wear face masks aboard for COVID safety reasons.

NJ Transit was among a number of agencies that made masks optional last week after a federal judge in Florida struck down the national federal mask order for travel.

A Change.org petition started two days ago asks NJ Transit to make a special face mask car offering similar to its designated quiet cars.

. . . Signs put in each mask car would explain the rules and enforcement could be handled similarly to disorderly conduct issues, he suggested.

Only about three dozen people had signed the Change.org petition for mask-only cars as of noon Tuesday, but the proposal is also circulating on social media. NJ.com has also reported that at least one board member has asked NJ Transit staff to report back on the feasibility of adopting a mask-only car model.

So, is it under consideration by NJ Transit? Not at this time, a spokesperson said Tuesday.

It looks as if COVID Karens have gone out of style. My anecdotal observation on the street is that maybe half the people wear them outside, but there seems to be a general acceptance that this is optional.

According to Wikipedia,

In law, desuetude is a doctrine that causes statutes, similar legislation, or legal principles to lapse and become unenforceable by a long habit of non-enforcement or lapse of time. It is what happens to laws that are not repealed when they become obsolete. It is the legal doctrine that long and continued non-use of a law renders it invalid, at least in the sense that courts will no longer tolerate punishing its transgressors.

The problem for the CDC is that by reinstating the mask rule, which it is currently continuing to do, while agencies are nevertheless ceasing to enforce it, which they are clearly now doing, the CDC risks making any future mask mandates covering new epidemics unenforceable. Apparently the CDC's idea in appealing the April 18 decision is to preserve its future ability to issue such a mandate, but in not allowing the current mandate to expire, they're going to bring about the same result of making any future rule unenforceable no matter what.

The solution is to get rid of these people. The battle needs to continue via the law and the ballot box.

More From Musk On Twitter

In yesterday's headlines: Elon Musk Puts Twitter’s $17M-Per-Year ‘Censorship Chief’ on Notice

Tech mogul Elon Musk has hinted that he is planning to fire Twitter’s “censorship chief,” who earns $17 million per year at the company.

Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde is seen as the leading advocate for censoring conservatives at the social media giant.

Gadde, who earned $17M last year as Twitter’s top legal counsel, has been put on notice that she is among the highly paid executives who stand to lose their job once Musk completes his takeover of the company.

Musk is reportedly planning to slash jobs and reduce executive pay as part of his plan to shake up Twitter.

Wikipedia confirms that Gadde is in fact Twitter's "policy, safety lead director and a chief legal officer and general counsel", which suggests she has a much more wide-ranging role than your typical SVP-legal affairs. Farther down, it notes

In 2018, Gadde joined Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for meetings in India where they talked with several Dalit activists about their experiences on Twitter; after the meeting, the activists gave Dorsey a sign reading "Smash Brahminical Patriarchy," which he was later photographed holding. The photograph attracted controversy, with some critics calling the sentiment discriminatory against Brahmins while others deemed it an appropriate response to caste- and gender-based oppression in India. Gadde responded to the social media furor with an apology in a series of tweets, "I'm very sorry for this. It's not reflective of our views. We took a private photo with a gift just given to us - we should have been more thoughtful. Twitter strives to be an impartial platform for all. We failed to do that here & we must do better to serve our customers in India."

She was one of the key officials at Twitter involved in decisions to suspend the account of former American President Donald Trump.

In other words, it looks as if for whatever reason, she got to tell Jack Dorsey what to think. Or in other words, she de facto ran the company, which however is unprofitable. No question Musk should put her on notice.

There's a subsidiary issue, which may have affected the timing of Musk's announcement, though I would also guess he'd been advised not to comment directly on the case: just last Saturday, April 30, Judge William Alsup ruled against Twitter's motion for summary dismissal in the case of Berenson v Twitter.

[Gadfly journalist Alex] Berenson, a vocal critic of the government’s pandemic response, sued Twitter after the company kicked him off the site for describing Covid vaccines as an advance therapeutic with risky side effects.

. . . Alsup focused his ruling on Berenson’s allegations that the company changed the ground rules on the content Twitter would allow on its platform, despite assurances from an executive that his posts weren’t up for censorship.

“Collectively, these actions plausibly qualify as a clear and unambiguous promise that Twitter would correctly apply its COVID-19 misinformation policy and try to give advance notice if it suspended plaintiff’s account,” Alsup wrote in his decision.

He also noted that “[a]ny ambiguities in a contract like Twitter’s terms of service are interpreted against the drafter, Twitter.”

I'm subscribed to Berenson's Substack (though not any sort of donor), and his position is that his attorneys have already pursued discovery on the case.

We have just sent Twitter a list of questions we would like them to answer, documents we would like them to produce, and admissions of fact we would like them to make. Here’s a sample:

Here's the situation for Twitter, which yet again is not profitable: Judge Alsup has allowed the case to proceed to trial, at least for now. The trial could be ten years away. But Berenson's attorneys are already making demands for discovery, which are first, expensive for Twitter to answer, and second, likely to damage Twitter's reputation further over that period of years, especially in an environment where corporate managers who play woke are coming under increasing attack.

Legal analysts say Twitter still has hope -- at least maybe a couple years down the road if Judge Alsup loses patience with Berenson or something:

This is an unusual ruling because, as Jess Miers and I documented, most account termination cases lose on the motion to dismiss. Two factors help explain this aberration. First, the backchannel communications between Berenson and Twitter execs are rare. (Compare King v. Facebook, where a rank-and-file employee’s sympathetic message didn’t help the plaintiff). And if those conversations occur, most trust & safety professionals never imply any promise in any conversation with any user. Second, Judge Alsup often gives plaintiffs chances on the motion to dismiss, only to drop the hammer on them later in the case when he feels like they overpromised and underdelivered. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Berenson loses this case on summary judgment with a derisive Judge Alsup opinion if Berenson can’t prove up Twitter’s promises or the reasonableness of his purported reliance on them.

But that's down the road, that is, if Twitter gets lucky, but meantime, there's all that discovery, and of course all those multimillions already going to Twitter's outside counsel, trial ten years away or no, which Twitter can ill afford.

And Elon Musk was presumably just briefed that Twitter's $17 million general counsel set the company up for this.

Work From Home!

Last week I wrote about the unique work culture in Silicon Valley, in which unproductive employees in bloated organizations are nevertheless remarkably entitled. This falls out to some extent everywhere in tech, but it's at its worst up in the San Jose area. I discovered a new manifestation of this phenomenon at Apple, where for the past two years employees have "worked from home" due to COVID, but management is now asking them to return to the office three days a week in something called the Hybrid Working pilot.

From my own anecdotal experience as a cutstomer of companies claiming to have been hurt by COVID, the actual impact of lockdowns occurred in the first half of 2020 but gradually abated throughout the rest of the year. Companies that claimed to have had their ability to serve customers badly reduced by early 2021 were using it as an excuse. For Apple to be trying to get back to normal only in mid 2022 suggests that everyone had simply been coasting, not least management.

As you might expect, there's pushback. An employee group called Apple Together has written a letter to management:

Dear Executive Team,

We have a long relationship with Apple. In fact, even before spending years, sometimes decades, working at Apple, many of us were devoted Apple customers. We grew up with Apple, we told our friends and families about Apple, we dreamt of one day joining Apple. Then, one day, we did. Apple grew through us. Like you, many of us were there through Apple’s near-death experience. We are still here, now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. Today, with your leadership and our ideas we still serve all of our customers and still try to surprise and delight people with our products. But our vision of the future of work is growing further and further apart from that of the executive team.

They stress a cult-like relationship with the company as an idea and finally get around to saying they "still serve all of our customers" -- but their idea of how to do this is departing from the managers who want them back in the office. The Conclusion of the letter aptly expresses the employees' state of mind:

In the original “Returning to our offices” email, Tim said “we’d make sure Apple delivered on its promises to its customers regardless of the circumstances”. It’s true, we delivered on our promises and continue to do so. We were incredibly flexible and resilient and found new ways to do our work, despite not being able to go to an office in many cases.

Now we ask you, the executive team, to show some flexibility as well and let go of the rigid policies of the Hybrid Working Pilot. Stop trying to control how often you can see us in the office. Trust us, we know how each of our small contributions helps Apple succeed and what’s required to do so. Our direct managers trust us and in many cases would happily let us work in a more flexible setup. And why wouldn’t they, we’ve successfully done so for the last two years. Why don’t you?

It sounds as if in the original appeal to come back to the office, management was delicately suggesting that work wasn't getting done and customers weren't being served. Back when I was working for a living, "work from home" was a perk reserved for the bosses, and it was manifested by the bosses calling phone conferences while they were doing things like driving their kids to dancing class but the rest of us were stuck in the office. Since the phone meetings were as useless as any other meeting, you'd have the kids screaming in the back seat of the car while the boss drove and talked on the phone, in fact a dangerous situation, and even less got done than usual.

I had one boss, Kim, who as far as I could tell spent her entire day driving the freeways around the San Francisco area and calling people from her car. I suspect alcohol was also involved, and I never understood how she avoided DUIs or worse. Nobody above her seemed to mind, but then, the CEO eventually spent a dozen years in federal prison for securities fraud. No company makes real money that way.

It sounds like Apple managed to extend this version of "work" to pretty much everyone, or maybe more accurately, everyone in the bourgeois office force -- I can't imagine that the people in China who actually built the phones got the same option. And the whole arrangement was about as wasteful and unproductive as anyone might imagine, to the point that management apparently began to feel pressure to get things done again.

When I left teaching to go into tech in the 1970s, I read a then-new book by Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming. I skimmed over it again just recently, but it's as if I'd read two different books. The point I took in the 1970s was that any tech group follows an informal organizational pattern whereby there are one or two people who know how things work and how to fix them, and the others are simply engaged in bringing their problems to the experts who do the work.

This dovetailed with other treatments like Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, in which the key observation was, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." In other words, most tech workers are incompetent idlers who use the organization to conceal their laziness and ineptitude from the managers, who don't know who the effective workers are. This was confirmed by my consistent observation throughout my tech career. Indeed, Scott Adams got rich writing comic strips that said the same thing.

When I reread Weinberg, I discovered that while he recognized that most tech workers weren't doing the work, he actually proposed a unicorns-and-rainbows solution to the problem whereby there would be "egoless programming", collaboration, no-fault peer review, and the like. Baloney. Things don't happen that way. For effective peer review, you would need a group of skilled programmers or engineers at roughly equal levels of job knowledge -- but that's not the environment Weinberg started with, and he had no realistic plan to get there.

Apple's problem in Silicon Valley represents Weinberg's paradox. In theory, you could treat the few highly creative tech workers like Apple treats all of its employees and get good results. Apple is succeeding only because its good people are barely tolerating the environment, while great crowds of drones are busily concealing from the managers who is actually doing the work -- and working from home has been an even more effiocient way to do that.

Someone at Apple has belatedly realized this won't work in the long run. Elon Musk, I have a feeling, is going to try a different model at Twitter, basically a version of nuke 'em all and let God sort it out. We'll see.

The US Right's Zelensky Problem

Yesterday, the Never Trump, Not Quite Zelensky Hot Air blog quoted Don Jr:

According to senior officials, [Biden's Lend-Lease] proposal, which includes $20.4bn in military aid, $8.5bn in economic aid and $3bn in humanitarian aid, is needed to "enable Ukraine's success over the next five months of this war".

Responding to the report, former president Donald Trump's eldest son suggested that the fund sent by the US would be "looted by corrupt politicians".

"Hard pass. How about we use it to help Americans in need? Or to perhaps secure our border? Maybe get our energy sector going again? Education? No, instead we’ll give it to one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where I’m sure most will be looted by corrupt politicians," he wrote on Twitter.

A little over a week ago, Tucker Carlson said,

"Inflation is higher than it's been in generations, maybe than it has been ever, depending on how you measure it," Carlson said.

"So Joe Biden's response is that he is going to print a lot more money and send it to the Government of Ukraine."

. . . "Shouldn't we have an audit of Zelensky's finances first?" Speaking mockingly, Tucker continued: "'Ooo shut up, that is Russian disinformation."

Among the tiny number of "no" votes on the lend-lease package was Madison Cawthorn, who himself has an established record as a fabulist and is dogged with ethics accusations, and who has previously called Zelensky "a thug". These appraisals are remarkably tone-deaf and to my mind call the judgment of Trump Jr, Carlson, and Cawthorn into question.

The first issue that comes to my mind is that there's an across-the-board consensus that Russian corruption has been a major factor in the astonishingly poor performance of the world's second largest army in Ukraine. This includes allegations that the generals have sold off critical components of the army's equipment and that they've padded the numbers in their units to collect the salaries of non-existent soldiers, as well as the imputation that senior officers are promoted for reasons other than military capability.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian armed forces have far outperformed expectations, sinking a major Russian warship, effectively denying Russia air superiority, and bringing the Russian blitzkrieg to a halt. If on one hand, Russian ineffectiveness can be attributed at least in part to corruption, to what can we attribute Ukrainian success? If Ukraine is corrupt, it must be far less so than Russia, judging at least by military effectiveness. By the same token, both Carlson and Trump Jr are clearly claiming that aid to Ukraine will be siphoned off in baksheesh, when every indication is that Ukraine is capably and effectively using every resource it's been given.

There are always red-flag indicators that trigger an audit (to be specific, this would be a "forensic" audit; there are also routine audits that are done periodically anywhere). The company's finance chief commits suicide, say. A branch VP suddenly buys a big yacht. A whistleblower goes to the IRS. Audits of this sort are the result of smoke-that-could-be-fire. As far as anyone can tell, Zelensky himself has no secret yachts in the Mediterranean. Much as Carlson and Trump Jr would like to find something like that, so far, nobody's come up with anything.

In fact, it said a great deal about Zelensky that the Biden administration apparently assumed he'd be like any other third-world dictator and flee the country with his cronies, mistresses, and pallets of cash, offering him a C-130 to skedaddle when the blitzkrieg got under way. His famous response was that he needed ammunition, not a ride.

The next factor to my mind is that handsome is as handsome does. I'm not the only person to note that his wartime leadership overall has been at the Lincoln or Churchill level. One key thing he's undersood has been that his job isn't just to rally the Ukrainian domestic population to make enormous sacrifice; it's been to make his case with world leaders. As a result, a country like Brazil, which has no dog in Ukraine's fight and had been neutral at best toward Ukraine, has turned around and pledged ammunition.

If Zelensky is on the take, it isn't showing in his job performance, which in part consists of a low-key, purposeful public persona reflecting a full-time dedication to the job at hand -- he dresses in khaki T-shirts and cargo pants and goes unshaven, sort of a Fidel Castro without the mugging for the camera. This isn't how oligarchs act.

The last factor I'd note is that as Aquinas says, sin dulls the intellect. For whatever reason, Putin convinced a generation of politicians that he was a brilliant guy, but when push came to shove, he turned out to be pretty dumb. On the other hand, Zelensky is turning out to be remarkably sharp. If he's using the office copier to file his tax returns, or if he's taking ballpoints home with him, I've got to think that's about the extent of it.

I don't know if Don Jr's views reflect those of Trump Sr. If they do, Trump is toast. The fact is that for whatever reason -- possibly because Secs Blinken and Austin have managed to cut out a sphere of discretion where Biden will just leave them alone -- Biden has somehow got on the right side of this issue and at least hasn't been badly damaging himself with it. I can't say the same for some swaths of the US Right.