So, Who's In Charge At The White House?

I'm back to my theories on what's actually going on in President Brandon's brain. As I've been saying for some time, I don't think it's senility or dementia; his thinking strikes me as purpose-driven, however obscure that purpose may be. Among the recent headlines saying he's surpassed modern records for presidential vacation days, I see most recently that the Brandons are returning to the beach this weekend:

For the second time this month, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will be spending the weekend at their North Shores beach home. The couple was in town the first weekend of June to celebrate Jill’s birthday, which was June 3, and this weekend is Father’s Day.

According to the White House’s Daily Guidance and Press Schedule issued June 16, the presidential couple are leaving Washington, D.C., at 11 a.m., Friday, June 17, and are expected to arrive in the Rehoboth area by 11:55 a.m. The guidance doesn’t say when the Bidens will be leaving the area; it just says they’ll be in town through the weekend. However, the Federal Aviation Administration has issued a restricted flight-area notice that lasts until 7:15 p.m., Monday, June 20.

I submit that if the president's thought processes are organized and purpose-oriented, then here we see a good part of his purpose, which we might characterize as "avoiding work". Haven't we all known people like that? Think about Wally in the Dilbert comic, then relate him to the real-world equivalents in our own careers. Don't we see those people in Joe? Let's see how this breaks out in the policy sphere. Take a recent report from Politico:

For more than a year, Democratic lawmakers and like-minded advocates have pleaded with Joe Biden to create a “gun czar” to address the epidemic of violence.

Each time, the president’s team pushed back with force, contending it has the perfect person already in place, someone with command over the issue and extraordinary access to the president himself.

That person is Susan Rice.

. . . Her ascendence to the role of point person on guns marks the latest chunk of policy turf over which she has claimed jurisdiction, joining a sprawling portfolio that stretches from policing and racial justice to student loan debt, immigration and health care policy, including a prime piece of protecting abortion rights.

The scope of her fiefdom is as remarkable as how she managed to secure it. Having eschewed a public-facing role, Rice has relied on a combination of internal maneuvering and bureaucratic know-how to place herself at the nerve center of some of the fiercest debates roiling Washington. And she’s further cemented her status with the president in the process.

Wait a moment. Isn't Ron Klain still chief of staff? But the story doesn't mention him until farther down:

Rice’s elevated stature in the West Wing has come with fierce loyalty from colleagues and praise so superlative-laden that it borders on deification. More recently, it has led to speculation inside the White House that she will succeed Ron Klain should he leave the chief of staff post.

I think there's a subtext here. Ron Klain was supposed to be in charge -- look at this puff piece from February 2021 in CNN:

Unusually visible, involved in practically everything, and free in sharing his opinions on what has become the new administration's must-follow Twitter feed, White House chief of staff Ron Klain has emerged as the building's most central figure aside from the President himself.

His combination of deep Washington experience and long professional ties to President Joe Biden have rendered Klain one of the most powerful chiefs of staff in history, officials and those close to the White House said, one uniquely positioned to confront the parallel crises facing the nation while also channeling a President he understands implicitly.

Except now Klain is on his way out, and Politico is trying to figure out who really runs the show. The odd thing is that both the CNN and Politico stories pump first Klain and now Rice, but a couple paragraphs farther down, they discount the influence of both. For instance, in Politico:

To some former colleagues and outside advocates, Rice has come to personify a kind of risk-averse, incremental approach to policy-making that they fear falls far short of addressing the country’s needs — and will ill-serve Democrats in the midterms and elections beyond.

“Rice is seen as a domestic policy lightweight and a block to any good things that happen to cross her desk,” said the leader of one progressive organization, who asked to withhold their name out of fear of angering Rice and the White House. “So everybody who wants to do big things has a vested interest in her desk being as empty as possible.”

If that's the case, then why is Biden so closely identified with two highly controversial policies, first, the abolition of fossil fuels, and second, pansexualism, including bringing transsexuals into the mainstream, having men compete in women's sports, and radical abortionism? He's been very clear for months now that rising fuel prices aren't his fault, but they're fine anyhow, because they'll make everyone buy electric cars? Or the latest leak that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, he'll declare a national health emergency?

I think the reality here is that he isn't listening to anybody, at least nobody in a conventional political job, although the agenda he most frequently expresses is much closer to Klain than Rice. But if Klain is out and Rice is in, why isn't he backing away from killing fossil fuels or supporting transgenders on the Day of Visibility? But these positions are nevertheless neither delusional nor hallucinatory. They're this-wordly and oddly consistent with some arcane purpose, whatever that may be.

His son Hunter, of course, claims Dad listens to him. That may be more credible than theories about either Ron Klain or Susan Rice. I'm inclined to see both Hunter's advice and an overriding desire to avoid any kind of real work as better explanations for the big guy's approach to the office.

Given The Perspective Of Yesterday's Post, Where Does Russia Stand?

What intrigues me about the Russia-Ukraine War is how it's first sent me to look at early modern history in Poland, the Baltic region, and Ukraine. But the map above is from Wikipedia and shows the Swedish Empire at its greatest extent about 1720, when the rise of Russia changed alignments. Here's the Wikipedia summary:

The Swedish Empire was a European great power that exercised territorial control over much of the Baltic region during the 17th and early 18th centuries (Swedish: Stormaktstiden, "the Era of Great Power"). The beginning of the empire is usually taken as the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, who ascended the throne in 1611, and its end as the loss of territories in 1721 following the Great Northern War.

. . . After the victories in the Thirty Years' War, Sweden reached the climax of the great-power era during the Second Northern War, when its primary adversary, Denmark–Norway, was neutralized by the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 (this is when the Swedish empire was at its largest extent). However, in the further course of this war, as well as in the subsequent Scanian War, Sweden was able to maintain its empire only with the support of its closest ally, France. Charles XI of Sweden consolidated the empire. But a decline began with his son, Charles XII. After initial Swedish victories, Charles secured the empire for some time in the Peace of Travendal (1700) and the Treaty of Altranstädt (1706), before the disaster that followed the king's war in Russia. The Russian victory at the Battle of Poltava put an end to Sweden's eastbound expansion, and by the time of Charles XII's death in 1718 only a much-weakened and far smaller territory remained. The last traces of occupied continental territory vanished during the Napoleonic Wars, and Finland went to Russia in 1809, with Sweden's role as a great power vanishing as well.

Sweden is the only Nordic country to have ever reached the status of a military great power.

If you overlay the map above with a map of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

you wind up with the approximate area that Russia now regards as in dispute -- militarily, it's attempting to regain control of Ukraine, but Putin has been making largely idle threats against what is effectively the full incorporation of the former Swedish Empire into NATO. Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion has applied to join the EU, would like to join NATO, but in the meantime has been concluding separate economic and defense agreements with Poland and the Baltics that look a lot like the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

All these maps in turn remind me of the map I posted Wednesday of a projected 2050 Baltic economic zone. Why is that map in particular even possible? I think it represents a return to economic and military conditions that prevailed before the rise of Russia as a modern state, especially before the late 1600s. This suggests to me that Poland, Sweden, and Finland are seizing the opportunity to expand their effective sovereignty under the NATO military umbrella, with Ukraine as a surrogate and with the endorsement of the EU.

Think about the current rhetorical meaning of the phrase "start World War III". It's been current throughout my lifetime, but actuallly most frequently in a corporate context -- "If you say that about Accounting, you'll start World War III." When we heard that in the 1970s, after Russia invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia with impunity, it was with the understanding that offending the Soviet Union was so unthinkable that it was comparable to bringing down the full authority of the CEO and the Board of Directors [i.e. the Almighty Himself] on one's own little department.

In contrast, by 2022, we have the US president quibbling with his secretaries of state and defense over the wording of highly provocative military threats against Russia, with the president complaining that if they're too strong, they'll start World War III. Except that we already know that as of 2022, the only actual result of such provocations has been to make Putin issue increasingly impotent threats. The strategic problem for the Soviet successor state is that it mustered nearly its full effective military strength against a third-rate power, which fought it to a standstill. Had it invaded even Poland, it's understood the result for Russia would have been clear disaster.

As a result, the most favorable realistic outcome for Russia given the current state of the war will be a cease-fire along roughly current battle lines, which would amount to a fairly minor extension of the borders following its 2014 invasion of Ukraine. It will not stop or negate the already enhanced alliances with the UK, Poland, and the Baltics. It would not prevent the admission of remaining Ukraine to the EU. But whether or not that even happens, the EU foreign and economic policy of integrating Ukraine will continue.

A negotiated settlement leaving Crimea, Donbas, and Mariupol out of Ukraine would not integrate these industrial areas into European economy, but Ukrainian grain and other industrial output would ship increasingly via Europe. This srikes me as a long-term trend, of which the current Ukraine conflict, and even the 2014 invasion, is just a symptom -- Russia is in a long-term decline that brings that part of Europe back to the 1600s.

The Actual Cause And Consequence Of Putin's War

The photo above was taken by Howard Lewsey, who is a UK-based railroad enthusiast, in Chitila, Romania. Posted on Facebook, it depicts a train of Ukrainian grain cars on their way to a Romanian port for export in order to bypass the Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports. It reflects several important factors in the Russo-Ukraine War that I've mentioned here in passing.

Even President Biden mentioned one of these factors in his speech to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia this week:

Folks, look, what Putin’s war has done is not only tried to wipe out the culture of the Ukrainians, decimate people, and commit innumerable war crimes, but is also — he’s also prevented the grain — thousands of tons of grain that are locked up in those silos, ready to be exported, but they can’t get out through the Black Sea because they’ll get blown out of the water. So we’re working on a plan to get it out through other countries by rail.

But guess what? Ukraine has a system like Russia has — a rail gauge that is different than the gauge of the rest of the tracks in Europe. So we’re going to build silos — temporary silos — in the borders of Ukraine, including in Poland, so we can transfer it from those cars into those silos, into cars in Europe, and get it out to the ocean, and get it across the world. (Applause.) But it’s taking time.

Well, silos are one solution, they're inefficient, and they're temporary. Biden mentions it as something he's doing to lower food prices, which I don't think will happen, because the whole issue is actually at the basis of the Ukraine war, not specifically the price of grain. But the issue in fact does go to the Russian railroad gauge, and the photo above reflects it as well.

The photo shows a Romanian locomotive running on track of the European standard gauge, which is 1435 mm between the rails. The green Ukrainian grain hoppers in the train behind it normally operate in Ukraine on the Russian gauge, 1520 mm between the rails. This is a big enough difference that cars using the Russian gauge can't operate on European track. This wasn't a problem as long as they were operating only from points in Ukraine to Ukrainian Black Sea ports like Odesa.

But as Biden says, in order to get the grain to European ports, something has to be done to overcome the difference in gauge. What's being done at the Romanian border is to use cranes to lift the Ukrainian cars off the Russian-gauge wheel assemblies and place them on European-gauge wheel assemblies. This is actually slightly more efficient than using silos to transload the grain from Ukrainian grain cars into entirely different Polish grain cars, but it's still expensive and time-consuming.

Another feature of the photo is the flat car between the Romanian locomotive and the train of green Ukrainian grain cars. Not only are the track and wheels incompatible between Europe and Ukraine, but the couplers that hold trains together are also incompatible. The flat car shown has a European coupler to connect it to the Romanian locomotive, with a Russian style coupler on the other end to connect it to the Ukrainian grain cars. This is another inefficiency, and discussion on that Facebook post indicates there's a shortage of that type of car.

Both the Romanians and the Ukrainians are working to eliminate the problem by extending European gauge track into Ukraine, which will be the inevitable solution going forward. This will have the equivalent result to the post-Reconstruction measure following the US Civil War of converting the Confederate railroad gauge, coincidentally the same as the Russian gauge, to the Union gauge, coincidentally the European gauge. This created a single US rail network that extended the Industrial Revolution into the South. The effect here will be further to integrate Ukraine into the European industrial economy, probably more significant than simply adding Ukraine to the EU.

The problem for Putin is that this isn't happening just in Ukraine. According to Wikipedia,

Rail Baltica (also known as Rail Baltic in Estonia) is an ongoing greenfield railway infrastructure project to link Finland (via ferry or an undersea tunnel), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania with Poland and through this with the European standard gauge rail line network. Its purpose is to provide passenger and freight service between participating countries and improve rail connections between Central and Northern Europe, specifically the area in the Southeast of the Baltic sea. Furthermore, it is intended to be a catalyst for building the economic corridor in Northeastern Europe. The project envisages a continuous rail link from Tallinn (Estonia) to Warsaw (Poland). It consists of links via Riga (Latvia), Kaunas and Vilnius (Lithuania) whose total length in the Baltic States is 870 km, with 213 km in Estonia, 265 km in Latvia, and 392 km in Lithuania. Rail Baltica is one of the priority projects of the European Union: Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T).

The rail networks in the Baltic countries after World War II and the Soviet seizure of those countries had used the Russian gauge and were primarily used as export outlets from Russia to the Baltic ports. This will transform the Baltic rail network to a north-south alignment of European gauge that will integrate the Baltic economies with the European industrial economy. A subsequent stage will be either rail ferries to Finland or an undersea rail tunnel that will bring the European standard gauge into Finland, which has always used the Russian gauge due to its status as a Russian economic satellite.

This development predates Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the Wikipedia entry says it's "one of the priority projects of the European Union". It's pretty clear that such an investment would be unthinkable without the Baltics being part of NATO. I would imagine that Finland, envisioning the benefits of a direct European rail connection via the Baltic rail project, would have been mooting NATO membership well before Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The investment in something like an undersea rail tunnel and the resulting economic benefit would be too great without an equivalent investment in defense, something Putin must also recognize.

But note the map I posted yesterday of a Baltic economic region envisioned for 2050. This is clearly intended as a consequence of, among other things, the Baltic rail integration into the European network. But note how ambitious that map is -- not only does it include Finland, it includes Belarus and even St Petersburg. And of course, Ukraine lies just to the south of Poland and Belarus. The EU is pretty clearly intending to extend its economic influence into Russian territory, and this will involve cultural change, including effective representative government and likely severely reduced political dependence on Moscow.

Faced with the EU's intent, I think Putin saw invasion of Ukraine as something of a last-ditch measure to forestall it. The problem is that the invasion, already a failure from that perspective, is simply going to hasten the conversion of Ukraine's rail gauge to the European standard and its integration into the European economy. As I've been noting here, Poland and the Baltics have already been making separate agreements with Ukraine for both defense and economic cooperation; they already have Ukraine in mind as part of the Baltic-centered community.

And this will leave Belarus between Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics. I don't think Putin or his successors can hold onto it for long.

Revisiting The Ukraine Dilemma For The US Right

There's been a steady rise in opinion favoring some sort of negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war, and although the US Right has been consistently against US support for the war, the appeasement option is no longer limited to the Right. For instance, on the 19fortyfive site,

Since it became evident a few weeks into Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine that Moscow’s troops were stopped cold outside of Kyiv, there has been a near-universal belief in the West that Ukraine would eventually win. All that was needed, many pundits claimed, was to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces sufficient numbers of weapons and ammunition. As the war now grinds towards the four-month mark, it is becoming painfully evident that the odds are stacked in Russia’s favor.

. . . Zelensky and the Ukrainian people will soon come face-to-face with the ugly prospect that continuing to fight will only bring more death and destruction to its people, cities, and armed forces – but be insufficient to stave off defeat. The truth is, military fundamentals and simple capacity are in Moscow’s favor. It is unlikely those factors change in time to avoid defeat for Kyiv and its brave people. That is the ugly, bitter reality of war.

Or this less coherent piece from the Hot Air blog:

The war increasingly looks like a straightforward contest to see which side will collapse first. The horrendous casualties taken by the Russian in close-quarters fighting around Kiev combined with promises of massive western military aid for Ukraine seemed unsustainable for Putin’s army, making them a likely loser.

But now that the war has shifted to the east and become a long-range slugfest in open terrain, the forecast has shifted. Unable to match the range of Putin’s artillery, it’s the Ukrainians who are taking horrendous casualties while Russian soldiers remain out of reach.

. . . “[E]very day that Western heavy-weapons supplies are delayed is measured in hundreds of Ukrainian casualties,” sources told the WSJ. The west may have done just enough to support the war without actually preventing Ukrainian defeat. What was the point of extending this conflict only to let the battle for the Donbas turn into a turkey shoot for the Russians?

The Right's position all along has been that support for Ukraine simply extends inflationary spending and ignores domestic problems like a baby formula shortage. There have also been echoes of the appeasemnt argument that it's a "quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing.” Ukraine is poor and corrupt, let them go.

This piece in the left-wing Daily Kos makes somewhat more sense of the argument in the links above that Ukraine is running out of ammunition -- but the ammunition they're running out of is their less effective legacy Warsaw Pact ammunition, which is being replaced by more effective NATO ammunition for the new weapons they're receiving.

Ukraine’s own ministry of defense acknowledges how much more effective NATO guns are, compared to the Soviet crap they’re phasing out (and Russia is stuck with), saying “these new [NATO 155 mm] shells are more effective than their Soviet equivalents, and hence their consumption is lower.” The accuracy is ridiculous. Russia can’t pull off stuff like this, because if they could, we’d see them release the drone footage.

Zelensky in recent speeches has referred to a bigger picture of overall progress and overall objectives:

Do you remember how Russia hoped to capture the entire Donbas in early May? It is already the 108th day of the war, it is already June. Donbas is holding on. The losses suffered by the occupiers, including in this area, are extremely significant. In total, the Russian army today has about 32,000 dead souls. For what? What did it give you, Russia?

No one can say now how long this burning of souls by Russia will last. But we must do everything to make the occupiers regret that they have done all this, and to hold them accountable for every murder and every strike at our beautiful state.

The problem remains that any negotiated solution that leaves Russia in control of Ukrainian territory will be just an invitation to try again, which was the situation after 2014. The second problem is the clear agenda of Soviet revanchism in Russian ruling circles, which isn't likely to change no matter the state of Putin's health. Slovakia, the Baltics, and Poland are most acutely aware of this, but clearly Russian ambitions have forced Sweden and Finland to abandon long-held neutrality.

So far, we still have the statement from US Defense Secretary Austin, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” More recently, he's said the US objective is "to ensure that we're providing Ukraine what Ukraine needs right now and . . . to look ahead to ensure that we're helping Ukraine to build and sustain robust defenses so that Ukraine will be able to defend itself in the coming months and years."

The problem I see at this point is that even an end state that restores Ukraine to pre-2014 borders doesn't necessarily weaken Russia "to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine". The more I study economic trends on the Russian frontier, the more I see an intent to integrate Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine into a coherent economic zone that will establish iteslf to the detriment of Russia.

The map at the top of this post should give an idea of where things are headed, and the economic zone envisioned there definitely includes not only the Baltics and Finland, but it extends to Belarus and parts of northwestern Russia. Ukraine is simply on its southern border.

Geostrategic planning needs to accommodate this likely development, as well as likely bitter Russian opposition to it. The current Russo-Ukraine War is just a stage in that process, which I think is inevitable. But if it's in Western interests for it to take place, it must follow that the West has to ensure that Russia "can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine", which in this case it definitely will do.

As I've said, so far it looks as though Secretaries Austin and Blinken have been able to carve out an area of discretion over Ukraine where Biden can't interfere. However, future political leadership will need to account more clearly for the likely direction of developments in this emerging region, of which Ukraine is only a part.

Let's Check In Again On Hunter And His Dad

There's been a steady stream of stories about Hunter's current situation that don't seem to have been sensational enough to reach the top of the news, but they continue to paint a puzzling picture. Still, according to today's Washington Examiner:

Hunter Biden recorded himself boasting that his father will adopt political positions at his command, footage obtained from a copy of his abandoned laptop shows.

"He'll talk about anything that I want him to, that he believes in," Biden said in reference to his father, Joe Biden, in the Dec. 3, 2018, recording. "If I say it's important to me, then he will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform. My dad respects me more than he respects anyone in the world, and I know that to be certain, so it’s not going to be about whether it affects his politics.”

Shrink? Therapy? Rehab? Hunter laughs!

"All those fears you think that I have of people not liking me or that I don’t love myself … I don't fear that. You know why I don't fear that? Because the man I most admire in the world, that god to me, thinks I'm a god," Hunter Biden added in the 77-minute recording, which was taped about five months before Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 presidential campaign in late April 2019. "And my brother did, too. And the three of us, it was literally — I had the support to know I can do anything."

In the recording, Hunter Biden bragged to his friend, British artist Phillipa Horan, that he was "better than anybody you know" as the pair discussed matters ranging from Joe Biden's presidential aspirations, Hunter Biden's struggles with addiction, an art project the two were working on together, and philosophical musings on how to live a fulfilling life.

“Everyone thinks it, talks about how — ‘How can you be as good as your dad?’ I'm better than my dad," Hunter Biden said. “You know why I’m better than my dad? Because my dad tells me I’m better than him, since I was 2 years old."

The conversation was taped at a house in Plum Island, Massachusetts, amid the throes of Hunter Biden's addiction to crack cocaine.

"Have you ever thought about this: Maybe this is the greatest thing that f****** ever happened to me," Hunter Biden mused to Horan about his addiction to the Schedule II narcotic. "Maybe this is literally the continuation and the continuum of what is going to be the thing that makes me the person that my father believes I am."

Well, there are few things that will make you think you're a god more than cocaine, and it looks like Hunter is showing that effect here, but he makes other references to what looks like a very strange Biden family dynamic. This may offer some perspective on stories about how Hunter's been faring since the Big Guy has been in the White House. For instance, in the New York Post last month:

A big-shot Hollywood lawyer reportedly paid off Hunter Biden’s delinquent taxes — which a source told The Post amounted to more than $2 million — as President Biden’s notoriously troubled son awaits the results of a Delaware grand jury’s investigation into his personal finances.

Kevin Morris, an entertainment attorney and novelist who earned a fortune representing the co-creators of “South Park” and won a Tony Award as the co-producer of “The Book of Mormon,” footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million — more than twice what was previously reported, a source familiar with conversations between the two told The Post.

Morris, whom Hunter Biden’s friends call his latest “sugar brother,” has also been funding the 52-year-old’s lifestyle in Los Angeles — including his rent and living expenses, the source said.

This, of course, would be the $20,000 per month rental in Malibu that's part of a compound in which the Secret Service also maintains an adjoining house, likely to keep Hunter on a very short leash. The services Morris bankrolls provide an additional benefit, according to the Post story:

His up-to-date tax bill could make it more difficult for prosecutors to convict Hunter Biden and hinder their ability to win a lengthy sentence if he was convicted, the New York Times reported.

Tax prosecutors would typically argue that paying an overdue balance wouldn’t affect a fraud case because the evasion still occurred. However, a judge and jury may be more sympathetic toward someone who eventually paid their bill.

So Hollywood big shot Morris seems to have gifted Hunter $2 million to pay his delinquent taxes while also funding his current lifestyle -- I would imagine $20,000 a month is just the tip of the iceberg. Mrs Hunter's own jet-setting humanitarian ventures might well figure into this; the woman is otherwise penniless. But it doesn't stop there. Elsewhere in the New York Post,

Kevin Morris, the generous Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who loaned Hunter more than $2 million to pay off his tax debts, has launched a sensational public-relations campaign to discredit the laptop and divert attention from its damning revelations of the Biden family’s international influence-peddling scheme.

Morris, 58, has assembled a team of 30 lawyers and investigators to help his friend Hunter, 52, “blunt the impact” of the Delaware probe, according to CBS News.

My goodness, how much does a "team of 30 lawyers" cost? This must be far more than a measly $2 million loan or $20,000 a month rent.

We must assume the Big Guy is aware of all this and must be appropriately grateful. So far, nobody seems to be paying much attention. but it seems to be costing one heck of a lot to keep Hunter out of the news. What does Keven Morris want for all these "free" services? Who's behind him, for that matter? Even a Hollywood lawyer can't be that rich. Nobody hires 30 other lawyers without a very, very good reason.

I smell hinky here. Big time hinky.

Yet Again, Is It Dementia?

The conventional wisdom, pretety much across the board, insists that Biden suffers from dementia -- but let's look at that term. According to this site,

It is not a single disease, but a general term for a range of conditions, including Alzheimer's disease. These conditions are caused when healthy brain cells are damaged and lose connections with each other.

As these changes in the brain occur, they may worsen over time. They may lead to problems with memory, thinking, and behavior, which can affect activities of daily life.

These changes in the brain can also cause hallucinations and delusions. In the United States, about 1 in 3 people with dementia may experience these symptoms.

As far as I can see, Biden has never, at least in public, shown evidence of hallucinations or delusions. He may stumble climbing the stairs to Air Force One, but he's pretty plainly aware that he is in fact climbing the stairs to Air Force One. He's fully aware that he's President of the United States, which is not a delusion. As far as I can tell, he's never credibly behaved as though he's speaking to someone who isn't there. He always appears to be aware that he's delivering a speech, say, or conducting a press conference, even if he's not good at it. (If he misspeaks and says he's in Toledo instead of Louisville, just about anyone would occasionally make that mistake, given a hectic travel schedule, and it may even be on the teleprompter.)

He's a poor communicator, but even his rhetorical incoherence is goal-driven and to some extent can even be characterized as weaponized incompetence, a feature of passive-aggressive behavior, not dementia. His tendency to blame his staff, the media, or Republicans for his own shortcomings neverthteless reflects an inkling that those issues exist and require some explanation or excuse. What's the real issue?

Let's look at a couple of recent vignettes. The first is reports of remarks about Ukraine President Zelensky at a Los Angeles fundraiser:

President Joe Biden told donors at a fundraising event in Los Angeles on Friday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “didn’t want to hear it” when U.S. officials warned him of the Feb. 24 Russian invasion. “Nothing like this has happened since World War II,” Biden said, according to the Associated Press. “I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating. But I knew we had data to sustain [Putin] was going to go in, off the border. There was no doubt, and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it,” he said.

This clearly irritated Ukraine's leadership. The story continues,

In response, Zelensky’s spokesperson Serhiy Nykyforov told Ukrainian news website LIGA.net that Zelensky spoke with Biden three or four times before the invasion, and Ukraine had called for preventive sanctions but Western allies “didn’t want to hear us.” Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podolyak also expressed his dislike for Biden’s phrasing, telling the news outlet it was “absurd to blame a country that for more than 100 days has effectively been fighting in a full-scale war against a much more resourceful opponent, if the key countries weren’t able to preventatively stop the militaristic appetites of Russia, knowing them perfectly well.”

What Biden was doing here is fairly common among people of a certain type at any age: they tell anecdotes portraying themselves as the heroes, even the saviors, in certain situations, simultaneously denigrating other people who were involved. Biden did this in an exclusive environment of wealthy donors that he felt would be a sympathetic audience. (It sounds as if one or two were nevertheless sufficiently unimpressed to leak the episode.)

Or another vignette from his trip to LA last weekend:

President Joe Biden was asked whether he had decided to visit Saudi Arabia to beg the leaders there to release more oil. “Have you decided whether or not to go to Saudi Arabia,” a reporter asked Biden.

“No, not yet,” the president said.

. . . “What would be holding up the decision at this point? Are there commitments that you’re waiting for from the Saudis?” a reporter asked.

“It happens to be a larger meeting taking place in Saudi Arabia. That’s the reason I’m going,” he said. “It has to do with national security for them [and] for Israelis … It has to do with much larger issues than having to do with the energy.”

The subtext of the exchange is that Biden is operating at a much higher level than the reporter understands. If the thought was that he'd be traveling only to beg the Saudis for oil, that was a huge mistake. The whole thing is about much larger issues than just oil.

This reflects what I've been saying about Biden all along, he believes he's operating at a level of realpolitik beyond the understanding of ordinary men. This may be maladaptive thinking, but given he's President of the United States, it isn't delusional in the sense that I might believe I'm Luke Skywalker. Nevertheless, it's at least not humble. Even someone like Lincoln, fully aware of the terrible authority he was forced to wield, characterized himself in down-to-earth terms. Biden in contrast is grandiose beyond his station but not specifically delusional.

This brings me to the N-word, in this case, narcissism. The problem with it, as I've said before, is that it carries a clinical and diagnostic connotation that makes people think they've accomplished something when they use it, but it's actually meaningless. If a Catholic priest refers to the seven deadly sins, we know exactly what he means. If even a credentialed YouTuber refers to the seven types of narcissism, it can mean anything, and another credentialed YouTuber can issue a completely different list.

So if I call Joe Biden a "grandiose narcissist", it may sound like I've accomplished something, although I'm not a mental health professional, and I haven't actually interviewed him. On the other hand, if I toss out the "narcissist" part and just call him "grandiose" I may even be a little closer to the mark. People of any age can be grandiose. It's a problem, but it's not a medical condition. It's an issue of character.

Maybe an even more specific diagnostic term might be tinhorn:

Pretending to have money, influence, ability, etc., though actually lacking in these; cheap and showy.

A petty braggart who pretends to be rich and important.

But the 25th Amendment is not the cure.

Yep, UFOs Are Going Mainstream

Let's begin with the story we haven't seen and likely never will:

DAYTON, OH A team of physicists and metallurgists from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded that metallic material collected from a Roswell, NM ranch in July 1947 is "conclusively not of terrestrial origin". "It has clearly been worked by intelligent beings not from our planet," said Edwin P Albright, Director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics, "and the metallic material contains isotopes that haven't been found up to now on Earth". The material was brought to the Roswell Air Force base on July 8, 1947 and immediately flown in a B-29 to Fort Woreth, TX. It was later transported to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, where it had been held under tight security until the Department of Defense allowed the team of investigators to conduct detailed tests earlier this year. . .

So let's put that non-event into the context of a story at yesterday's Hot Air:

Ever since Congress got the ball rolling on the investigation of UFOs and established the new horribly-named AOIMSG office, other government agencies have slowly but surely moved toward cooperating in these efforts. The latest to join the party is NASA, arguably one of the best-suited agencies in terms of possessing the technology to see what might be “out there.” On Thursday, NASA announced that they will soon be launching a program wherein they will comb through their mountains of telescopic and sensor data to find out if they may have recorded anything anomalous that should be brought to the attention of the new UFO investigatory office. The initial program will run for nine months, with extensions being possible if the results are promising. So will traditional scientists scoff at using NASA’s vast scientific resources in such a pursuit? Perhaps. But the agency’s science mission chief isn’t worrying about any “reputational risk.”

As far as I can see from this account, NASA is bringing nothing new to the party, it's simply opening up existing "telescopic and sensor data" to allow a new bunch of civil servants to pull up the usual blurry images and do the usual wild speculation. NASA even goes so far as to acknowledge "reputational risk" in this course of action, but they're plunging ahead.

Something's hinky here. We're coming off the tail of the COVID panic, but I'm wondering if a substantial part of the population hasn't calmed down. The fact is that there's nothing new on the UFO front, and there hasn't been anything new -- just the same old first-person accounts and blurry images -- since the original UFO panic in the 1940s and 50s. I remember as a kid finding books by George Adamski in the town library, and it's worth revisiting that guy's career. The Wikipedia entry is entertaining:

George Adamski (17 April 1891 – 23 April 1965) was a Polish-American author who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he displayed numerous photographs in the 1940s and 1950s that he said were of alien spacecraft, claimed to have met with friendly Nordic alien Space Brothers, and claimed to have taken flights with them to the Moon and other planets.

Adamski was the first, and most famous, of several so-called UFO contactees who came to prominence during the 1950s. Adamski called himself a "philosopher, teacher, student and saucer researcher", although most investigators concluded his claims were an elaborate hoax, and that Adamski himself was a charlatan and a con artist.

Adamski authored three books describing his meetings with Nordic aliens and his travels with them aboard their spaceships: Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-written with Desmond Leslie) in 1953, Inside the Space Ships in 1955, and Flying Saucers Farewell in 1961. The first two books were both bestsellers; by 1960 they had sold a combined 200,000 copies.

. . . In the early 1930s, while living in Southern California, Adamski founded the "Royal Order of Tibet" in Laguna Beach, which held its meetings in the "Temple of Scientific Philosophy". Adamski served as a "philosopher" and teacher at the temple. The "Royal Order of Tibet" was given a government license to make wine for "religious purposes" during Prohibition; Adamski was quoted as saying "I made enough wine for all of Southern California ... I was making a fortune!" However, the end of Prohibition in 1933 also marked the decline of his profitable wine-making business, and Adamski later told two friends that's when he "had to get into this [flying] saucer crap."

In 1940 Adamski, his wife, and some close friends moved to a ranch near California's Palomar Mountain, where they dedicated their time to studying religion, philosophy, and farming. In 1944, with funding from Alice K. Wells, a student of Adamski, they purchased 20 acres (8.1 ha) of land at the base of Palomar Mountain, along highway S6, where they built a new home, a campground called Palomar Gardens, and a small diner called Palomar Gardens Cafe.

At the campground and diner Adamski "often gave lectures on Eastern philosophy and religion, sometimes late into the night" to students, admirers, and tourists. He also built a wooden observatory at the campground to house his six-inch telescope, and visitors and tourists to Palomar Mountain often received the false impression that Adamski was an astronomer connected to the famed Palomar Observatory at the top of the mountain. Adamski would correct this inaccurate impression "only when pressed to do so." Though he was usually referred to as "Professor" Adamski by his admirers and followers and he often implied or claimed to possess various academic degrees, Adamski held no graduate or undergraduate degree from any accredited college or university, and in fact had only a third grade education.

The picture I get is of a type of California pioneer who somehow perceived a deep-seated unease in the population and an openness to quackery that reached full bloom in the various moral panics of the late 1940s and 1950s -- McCarthyism and comic books come to mind as well as UFOs. Adamski was a key entrepreneur of the 1950s UFO panic. But we see signs of a renewed UFO panic now, including a new generation of Adamski-style hucksters building on the seminal work of Erich von Däniken, who added the ancient alien wrinkle to the whole story.

So we see renewed congressional investigations and what's shaping up to be Project Bluebook on steroids. We're seeing renewed quasi-academic respectability for the field, but beyond that, a media gold mine. It means government budget, academic careers, hit TV shows, and heaven knows what else is to come.

I think the bottom line is that, as they did in the late 1940s and 1950s, the times they are a-changin.