Monkeypox Hype

It looks like we're back to the political conundrum of the early 1980s with the spread of AIDS. It was recognized that AIDS was a disease spread almost entirely through sexual contact, and beyond that, it was spread via promiscuous sexual contact among gay males. This reflected badly on gays, especially when the discussion focused on institutions like bath houses and unsanitary things that went on there. On the other hand, gays argued that if the government didn't make finding a cure and vaccines a priority, this discriminated against gays.

Thus there was a media-driven messsage that AIDS wasn't a gay disease, anyone could catch it, although the circumstances advanced to prove this were limited to cases like contaminated blood in transfusions. Nevertheless, I remember consternation at my then Episcopalian parish about whether it could be transmitted via the communion vessels. This sort of public hysteria advanced the interests of the gay lobby, but it also advanced the interest of the public health establishment in creating a more general attitude that epidemics should be the cause of panic.

So we move forward 40 years to Monkeypox, which is clearly being advanced in the media as the next big epidemic. Thus via CBS News:

Clinics that treat sexually transmitted diseases — already struggling to contain an explosive increase in infections such as syphilis and gonorrhea — now find themselves on the front lines in the nation’s fight to control the rapidly growing monkeypox outbreak.

After decades of underfunding and 2½ years into a pandemic that severely disrupted care, clinic staffers and public health officials say the clinics are ill-equipped for yet another epidemic.

“America does not have what it needs to adequately and totally fight monkeypox,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “We are already stretched to capacity.”

Note the words "struggling . . . on the front lines in the nation's fight" blah blah blah. It's World War II! The whole nation is struggling! Dr Scott Gottlieb furthers the narrative on Face the Nation:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Give us a sense of the scale of this because the CDC numbers are out. They say they're only eight women within that. No children. You're saying this is a pandemic? That's not a word the administration is using yet, what level of emergency are we at?

DR. GOTTLIEB: Yeah look, and I think they're going to be reluctant to use the word pandemic, because it implies that they've failed to contain this. And I think at this point, we've failed to contain this. . . . I think the window for getting control of this and containing it probably has closed, and if it hasn't closed, it's certainly starting to close. 11,000 cases across the world right now. 1,800 cases, as you said, in the US. We're probably detecting just a fraction of the actual cases because we have a very, we had for a long time a very narrow case definition on who got tested. And by and large, we're looking in the community of men who have sex with men and STD clinics. So we're looking there, we're finding cases there. But it's a fact that there's cases outside that community right now. We're not picking them up, because we're not looking there. This has spread more broadly in the community. I wouldn't be surprised there's thousands of cases right now.

MARGARET BRENNAN: It's a little chilling to hear you say containment has failed. I've heard you say that before with COVID.

DR. GOTTLIEB: Well look, this isn't going to explode like COVID. This is a slower moving virus, which is why we could have gotten control of this if we had been more aggressive up front, and we made a lot of the same mistakes that we made with COVID with this - having a very narrow case definition not having enough testing early enough, not deploying vaccine in an aggressive fact- fashion to ring vaccinate. But now this is firmly embedded in the community.

So the narrative is being shaped -- it's already out of control. Well, maybe not as bad as COVID, but it's gonna be like COVID! We haven't been doing enough! It's probably too late! And of course, this isn't just gay men, it's just that we haven't tested enough straights and women! Just wait! It's embedded in the community!

Again, as with AIDS, two groups benefit from this narrative. The first is the public health establishment, which has benefited enormously in both funding and prestige from driving public policy in the COVID pandemic, and it would like to continue to do this. The second group is the gay lobby, which secures priority for public health spending on diseases that spread primarily among men who have promiscuous sex with men. This is done in some measure by making misleading claims about how such diseases aren't sexually transmitted, and that anyone can catch them.

Thus the reaction is predictable:

Demonstrators in San Francisco protested Monday against what they called the federal government’s “failure” to provide enough monkeypox vaccine to prevent the outbreak from becoming a major problem, particularly in the gay community.

The disease, which is transmitted through prolonged and intense physical contact, often results in a fever and in unsightly blisters. It is rarely fatal, but is uncomfortable and can last for several weeks.

. . . Demonstrators in San Francisco were concerned that the Biden administration had failed to provide enough vaccines to prevent the monkeypox virus from becoming endemic within the community, noting that a vaccine had been developed in 2019 but was then “ignored.”

Kabuki

In Politico yesterday,

White House officials plotting the administration’s post-Roe response are weighing a narrow public health directive aimed at safeguarding nationwide access to abortion pills, three people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.

The Biden team has zeroed in on that authority in recent days. They consider it the most feasible of the White House’s limited options for protecting abortion rights, and have concluded that it could have the most immediate on-the-ground impact while also quelling Democrats’ demands for stronger action.

In addition to trying to circumvent the Dobbs decision with an abortion public health emergency, there's also been an idea of circumventing Sen Manchin's rejection of the Green New Deal by declaring a climate emergency:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that President Biden won’t declare a climate emergency this week, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do it eventually.

“He’s going to take, as I said, additional climate actions in that vein tomorrow, and he’s going to continue — he’s not going to just stop with the actions of tomorrow, but I would not plan [an] announcement this week on [a] national climate emergency,” Jean-Pierre told reporters during a press briefing.

“Everything’s on the table. It’s just not going to be this week on that decision,” she added.

But here's the problem:

Sometimes, the media presses and asks some good questions. They did that on Tuesday, asking why wasn’t there anything on Joe Biden’s public schedule for the past two days. The scramble from first, National Security Council coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby and then, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, to try to cover for Biden was something to behold.

Co-Press Secretary John Kirby says Biden has been “quite busy” the past few days despite having ZERO public events on his schedule. pic.twitter.com/2VlGtHlDU0

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 19, 2022

Kirby claimed that just because there weren’t things listed on the public schedule didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of work going on. Then he passed the buck to explain things to Jean-Pierre. That didn’t go any better.

“What, exactly, has he been doing yesterday and today?” a reporter asked.

. . . “So, he’s been in meetings,” Jean-Pierre claimed, blinking furiously and not looking directly at the reporters. “I was scheduled to meet with him today,” she said, saying he was meeting with senior staff. She also said that they may have seen him briefly with Jill Biden and the First Lady of Ukraine. “He’s been very busy dealing with the issues of the American people and meeting with his staff, senior staff,” she argued.

Nevertheless, there ain't gonna be a climate emergency this week. And if "Dr" Jill is right, he's just so busy he can't seem to get around to either Dobbs or the climate:

“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment,” the First Lady reportedly told about two dozen people at a private home.

Jill Biden referenced gun violence, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and opposition to signature legislation within his own party as examples of unforeseen obstacles her husband has contended with.

“He’s just had so many things thrown his way,” she reportedly said. “Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v. Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.”

In other words, things like Dobbs and Build Back Better going south have made the big guy so busy he can't even deal with Dobbs and Build Back Better going south. I think this actually gives Hunter, the First Crackhead, a certain level of gravitas now that he's been quoted as calling his stepmom a "selfish, silly, entitled [moron]" (more ior less). But it's not just Dr Jill who's selfish, silly, and entitled. It sounds like it applies to the whole family.

They're all coasting. So, of course, is Speaker Pelosi.

"The Speaker Does Not Own Any Stocks."

I've already pointed out the Pelosi family's insistence that "Madam Speaker doesn’t even drink alcohol!", but now we have a new whopper to add to the list. According to Fox Business,

Nancy Pelosi's office responded to her husband's controversial computer chip stock trades ahead of Congress' vote on the semiconductor industry.

FOX Business reached out to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office for comment about her husband’s recent stock trades, particularly inquiring about Paul Pelosi's million-dollar purchase of stock in a semiconductor company as Congress is slated to vote on a $52 billion subsidy to the industry as part of a bill to increase U.S. manufacturing of computer chips to make the country less reliant and more competitive with China.

"The Speaker does not own any stocks. As you can see from the required disclosures, with which the Speaker fully cooperates, these transactions are marked ‘SP’ for Spouse. The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions," Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in a statement to FOX Business.

And of course, Joe Biden has never discussed Hunter's business dealings with the First Crackhead. According to the International Business Times,

Through his various business ventures, [Paul] Pelosi has accumulated a net worth of $120 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

. . . The businessman is the founder of the San Francisco-based real estate and venture capital investment and consulting firm Financial Leasing Services. Through the company, he and his wife have amassed a personal fortune of more than $100 million.

Pelosi also has shares in a number of major companies, including Apple, Facebook, Walt Disney, Comcast, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and the real estate group Russell Ranch.

His biggest investment reportedly came in June 2021, when he purchased around $4.8 million worth of shares in Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Not much is known about Paul Pelosi or his family, but there are intriguing hints in hs Wikipedia entry:

Pelosi was born and raised in San Francisco, the youngest in a family of three boys. His father was John Pelosi, a wholesale druggist. He attended St. Ignatius High School and graduated from Malvern Preparatory School in Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor of science (BS) in foreign service at Georgetown University, during which he met his future wife, Nancy D'Alesandro, who was attending a Roman Catholic women's college, Trinity College, in Washington, D.C. He earned an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Graduating from an exclusive prep school is an important social marker, as is studying for the foreign service -- the US State Department was then, and continues to be, an institution for the socially connected. In the wake of his May arrest for drunk driving, it emerged that in 1957, he was responsible for his brother's death in a sports car accident:

Paul Pelosi was just 16, a high school sophomore, when his sports car flipped over in February 1957 in Northern California.

A newspaper report at the time said Paul, a high school sophomore, would be cited for misdemeanor manslaughter. In the end there was no court case and he was exonerated by a coroner's jury.

. . . The crash occurred at 2:40 am on February 22, 1957. Paul had picked up his brother from a girlfriend's house in San Francisco and the siblings decided to go on a joyride rather than go straight home.

David Pelosi, a freshman at the College of San Mateo, was dead on arrival at the hospital.

So Paul had a sports car, and it's hard to avoid thinking his dad had connections that could fix things with the coroner's jury. His wife-to-be, Nancy D'Alessandro, according to the Washington Post,

came from a prominent Italian-American family. Her father, Thomas J. D'Alesandro Jr., also known as Old Tommy or Tommy the Elder, was [a] flamboyant and legendary machine politician, a Roosevelt Democrat. . . . Big Tommy served 22 consecutive terms in public office, from state delegate to city councilman to U.S. congressman to Baltimore mayor, followed by a low-level appointment from President John F. Kennedy to something called the Federal Renegotiation Board.

One of Pelosi's five brothers, Thomas J. D'Alesandro III, Young Tommy, served on the Baltimore City Council and became the city's mayor as well.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the marriage of Nancy and Paul at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore on September 7, 1963 was an important event for two prominent Italian-American families. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1969, where Paul’s brother Ronald Pelosi was a member of the City and County of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. According to Wikipedia, Ron Pelosi

was a member of the San Francisco City Planning Commission, and of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 1968 to 1980, of which he was president from 1978 to 1980. He was chairman of the board of the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System and was on the boards of directors of the Association of Bay Area Governments, Golden Gate Bridge District and the League of California Cities.

He was also married to Barbara Newsom, an aunt of California Gov Gavin Newsom, from 1966 to 1977.

This is a remarkable story of people who've gotten by on political connections for generations. The Speaker doesn't drink, and she doesn't own any stocks.

That's Their Story, And They're Sticking To It

It turns out that I'm not the only one who hasn't bought the Institute for the Study of War's line that the Russians undertook an "operational pause" over the past week. The Daily Kos, whose reporting on the war is among the best, had this to say this morning:

Russia is stalled, pretending it is undertaking an “operational pause.” In reality, Russia is 1) exhausted from the [Donbas] effort, 2) still unable to cross the Donetsk river north of Sivers’k, 3) having to extend its supply lines, something they suck at doing, and 4) dealing with HIMARS’ systematic destruction of supply depots, dramatically exacerbating those supply problems.

Yesterday, CNN reported,

While Russian forces fire at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk in preparation for the next stage of full-scale fighting in the war, the country's defense ministry in Moscow on Saturday ordered commanders to take action to prevent Ukrainian strikes on Russian-held territory.

"(Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu) gave the necessary instructions to further increase the actions of groups in all operational areas in order to exclude the possibility of the Kyiv regime to launch massive rocket and artillery strikes on civilian infrastructure and residents of settlements in Donbas and other regions," the ministry said in a statement.

. . . The order comes in response to a sharp rise in Ukrainian attacks far behind the front lines using recently acquired western howitzers and artillery.

Yesterday, I noted the ISW's reference to this same announcement, which it characterized as, "The Russian Defense Ministry announced that the Russian operational pause has concluded on July 16, confirming ISW’s July 15 assessment." But CNN quotes this announcement, presumably in translation, and neither CNN nor the ISW links to the original text. It puts me on my guard, though, that CNN doesn't seem to regard the announcement as the end of an "operational pause", but more like what the Daily Kos sees as a change in battlefield conditions.

Meanwhile, the ISW this morning says,

Russian forces are continuing a measured return from the operational pause and conducted limited ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast on July 17. As ISW has previously noted, the end of the Russian operational pause is unlikely to create a massive new wave of ground assaults across multiple axes of advance despite Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s public order for exactly that. . . . Russian forces continued to set conditions for resumed offensives toward Slovyansk, shelled settlements along the Izyum-Slovyansk salient, and otherwise conducted artillery, missile, and air strikes throughout Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense notably did not claim any new territorial gains on July 17. ISW continues to forecast that the end of the operational pause will be characterized by a fluctuating and staggered resumption of ground offensives.

But we're back to the question everyone seems to have had all along: even the ISW agrees the Russians never stopped shooting. Where was the "operational pause"? The ISW has been replying that, well, US doctrine (!) says you can't stop shooting, because then the enemy will know you're having an operational pause, and you can't make the enemy think that, so you have to keep shooting to fool them. Or something.

So throughout this discussion, the ISW has been saying in effect, there's been an operational pause, but it doesn't look like one, because the Russians have had to make it look like they're trying to continue to advance. Of course, they haven't advanced over the past week, despite they've been trying to look like that's what they're doing, but now that they've officially ended the "operational pause", they're gonna start moving. By fits and starts. Or maybe they won't. But anyhow, they've officially ended their operational pause. That's what Sergei Shoigu says, so it's true.

Frederick W Kagan, whose name appears on almost all these reports, was one of the major architects of the Iraq boondoggle. This drove me to see what I could find via web searches, and it turns out there's a lot of material on Kagan and his wife, Kimberly, from the late Bush and early Obama eras. Here's just a start, from 2008, Too Many Kagans, Too Little Knowledge:

Fresh from his assertion that the Iraq civil war was “over” a week ago, here’s Fred–plus added bonus attraction Kimberly–Kagan reinforcing their profoundly warped view of Iraq in the Weekly Standard. There are several truly disingenuous, and flat out misleading, things here:

1. The promulgation of the myth that Maliki’s Folly was to clean out “terrorists” rather than a violent election-year ploy to clear out his legitimate Sadrist political opposition.

2. Perpetuation of the myth that effective Iraqi Security Forces actually exist and aren’t primarily composed of (a) pro-Maliki and pro-Hakim militias and (b) former Iraqi soldiers more interested in making a living than in fighting. (Add: No acknowledgment that U.S. troops in the field simply do not trust their Iraqi counterparts…Oh, and I should also add: Some of the most “effective” ISF units are Kurdish pesh merga militias.)

It goes on. The best I can conclude is that Kagan and his wife make a good living from getting things wrong, and they're able to keep doing this despite an atrocious track record because they have -- connections.

I'm not sure how much time I should spend tracking this stuff down. It depends on whether anyone who matters, as opposed to news outlets nobody takes seriously, currently listens to the Kagans. Whether they're just naturally stupid, or whether someone is paying them to be this stupid, is an interesting question. My antennae are up.

The Glass Is Half Empty

I've had a running commentary on the Institute for the Study of War and the conundrum of how they seem to have so many highly credentialed experts to write their Russian campaign assessments who manage to say so little. This is particularly intriguing as we seem to be entering an inflection point in the Russo-Ukraine War, since by all accounts, not only have the highly publicized HIMARS artillery systems reached combat, but all the other Polish Krabs, French Caesars, German Panzerhaublitzen, and US M270 advanced artillery systems as well. If these have begun to be effective, we should be seeing results by now.

The problem is that the ISW has been putting all its money on, first, a Russian offensive pause to regroup, resupply, and rethink, and then second, a renewed resumption of the offensive following this pause. A big problem with this theory, as I've pointed out, has been that reports differ on whether there has actually been such a pause, despite Russian official announcements. (These people all have degrees in Russian studies and speak Russian, yet they seem to believe implicitly in Russian official announcements. I majored neither in German nor Teutonic Studies, and my German won't win me any prizes, but I think I know Germans better than they know Russians.)

As I noted, on July 6, the ISW reported on the initial Russian announcement of an "offensive pause", followed immediately by an objection from the governor of Luhansk that there had been no such thing. They've spent the past ten days basically arguing with the governor of Luhansk, who I've got to assume doesn't need a degree in Russian studies to hear the rumble of artillery. At the same time, the ISW has had almost nothing to say about either the arrival or any observable effect of the new NATO weapons on the battlefield.

This report from July 15 is a recent sample of the ISW line:

Russian forces are likely emerging from their operational pause as of July 15. Russian forces carried out a series of limited ground assaults northwest of Slovyansk, southeast of Siversk, along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway, southeast of Bakhmut, and southwest of Donetsk City. These assaults may indicate that Russian forces are attempting to resume their offensive operations in Donbas. The assaults are still small-scale and were largely unsuccessful. If the operational pause is truly over, the Russians will likely continue and expand such assaults in the coming 72 hours.

Contrast this with an equivalent assessment from the UK Ministry of Defence fom July 16:

Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 16 July 2022

Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/CkouEyTZAD

🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/Z0M9tGmMN7

— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) July 16, 2022

There's no reference to a deliberate "pause", but an observation that "Russian offensive operations remain reduced in scope and scale", whatever the cause. There is also an observation that "Ukrainian defence has been successful in repulsing Russian attacks since Lysychansk was ceded and the Ukrainian defensive line was shortened and straightened." One thing I've noticed in the current phase is that Ukraine has kept much more of a lid on battlefield reports, especially concerning the use and effectiveness of the new NATO weapons, but especially if there has been no deliberate Russian "offensive pause", which I think it's likely there hasn't been, the reduced scope and effectiveness of the Russsian campaign must be attributable to the new weapons.

As of this morning, however, the ISW declares that the "offensive pause" is at an end:

The Russian Defense Ministry announced that the Russian operational pause has concluded on July 16, confirming ISW’s July 15 assessment. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ordered Southern Group Commander General of the Army Sergey Surovikin and Central Group Commander Colonel General Alexander Lapin to increase offensive operations on all axes on July 16, but the tempo of the resuming Russian offensive will likely fluctuate or stutter over the coming days.

So what's going to change? The Kremlin says the generals have been ordered to increase operations, but it's likely they won't have much success, at least according to the ISW. How does this differ from the UK MoD assessment, especially if we take out the idea of an "offensive pause"? The situation on the ground continues, but the Kremlin's announcements are irrelevant. This is what the principle of parsimony would suggest, and it's what I would comment on a student paper that took the long way around on this question, but then, that's why I quit grading student papers nearly 50 years ago.

Oddly, it looks like the ISW has finally been dragged kicking and screaming to a similar conclusion. In the next section down, they acknowledge:

Ukrainian HIMARS strikes against Russian ammunition depots, logistics elements, and command and control are likely degrading Russian artillery campaigns.

And indeed, huffing and puffing, they struggle to catch up with recent history:

Ukrainian officials confirmed that American-supplied HIMARS arrived in Ukraine on June 23. Ukrainian operators have been using the HIMARS to strike multiple Russian targets – notably ammunition depots – since June 25. The destruction of these ammunition depots has likely degraded Russian forces’ ability to sustain high volumes of artillery fire along front lines.

Gee, d'ya think? But if they've been blowing up supply depots with HIMARS since June 25, why do you think Russia announced its "operational pause" on July 6? I'm with the UK MoD that sees this as kabuki for the domestic audience. On the other hand, Frederick W Kagan earned a B.A. in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history, both from Yale University. You can read more at the Wikipedia entry, including the part about his close involvement with the US occupation strategy in Iraq, his close relationship with the squirrely David Petraeus, and the unanswered questions about what he owes defense contractors or what they owe him.

With the Yale degrees and all, is he really as dumb as the ISW assessments he writes make him look, or does he just have an interest in being selectively dumb? By the same token, Kagan himself has Yale advanced degrees, but the other names on the assessments are bright young things with only non-Ivy BAs who look a great deal like the pampered and docile domestic pets who staff the tech firms. I give them credit, they're writing what they're expected to write so they'll have careers inside the Beltway and homes in Bethesda.

But why have the ISW's assessments been so consistently defeatist since the start of the war? Something's going on here.

Musk , Trump, And The Truthteller

I note that Donald Trump is beginning to reinsert himself into public discourse, and as he does, espeically in his recent social media exchanges with Elon Musk, he's reminding me of his appeal. That appeal, of course, took him from long-shot vanity candidate for president in 2015 to his asymmetric defeat of Hillary the following year. The 2024 election is a long way away, but it's worth noting that the right people are already starting to get nervous. Here's wishful thinking from David Brooks:

[T]he 2024 presidential primaries could be wild. Sure, conventional candidates like the Republican Ron DeSantis or the Democrat Gavin Newsom may run for the nominations. But if the hunger for change is as strong as it is now, the climate will favor unconventional outsiders, the further outside the better. These sorts of oddball or unexpected candidates could set off a series of swings and disequilibriums that will make the existing party systems unstable.

Furthermore, if ever there was a moment ripe for a Ross Perot-like third candidate in the 2024 general election, this is that moment. There are efforts underway to prepare the way for a third candidate, and in this environment an outsider, with no ties to the status quo, who runs against the establishment and on the idea that we need to fundamentally fix the system — well, that person could wind up winning the presidency.

The one name he doesn't mention, of course, is the Unmentionable Orange, who strikes me as the once and future oddball or unexpected candidate who has already set off a series of swings and disequilibriums that have made the existing party systems unstable. What about Latins moving Republican, for instance? Isn't that Trump's doing? Brooks is hoping for a Ross Perot who'll look good but will wilt in the heat as Perot in fact did and who'll prove innocuous enough to stand aside for an inevitable Newsom or Romney.

Trump's appeal in 2016 was that he wasn't that guy. One thing that intrigues me about Trump as a public figure is that conventionally minded pundits accuse him of being a "narcissist", but under what we might call received narcissistic theory, Trump is a "truthteller", which in many ways is the opposite of a narcissist. From a typical discussion board:

Narc[issist]s don't like truthtellers, even when the truth teller remains silent and doesn't speak their truth.

The narc knows that you know, you have rumbled them, you have seen behind the facade and you know them for what they are.

Thus we have Trump truthtelling on Elon Musk:

When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican.

. . . Now Elon should focus on getting himself out of the Twitter mess because he could owe $44 billion for something that’s perhaps worthless.

All I can say is it's hard to argue with the guy. Elon is getting to the end of his 15 minutes of fame, and he's turning into something of a weirdo. Trump, on the other hand, is what he's pretty consistently been as a public figure, a guy who doesn't beat around the bush, which is what many people find endearing while many others are uncomfortable. As an American archetype, he's a bit of Ishmael in Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, or the noir detectives Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.

So far, it seems like both the Democrats and the Never Trumpers are desperate for someone, anyone they can put up as some sort of simulacrum of an honest outsider who of course will prove to be no such thing. Their problem is that no matter on whom they fixate on the outsider du jour, Trump's still outperforming everyone in the polls.

All the right people are nervous.

Asymmetry And The Conventional Wisdom

As sometimes happens, I sat up in bed early this morning suddenly recognizing that nobody has pointed out that the Russian abandonment of Snake Island on June 30 was an unacknowledged victory for the asymmetric strategy in the Russo-Ukraine War. After four months of trying to defend the island, losing major naval assets in the process, including the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, the Russians left -- but Ukraine chose not to reoccupy the island. It would have been just as expensive for them to defend as it was for the Russians. and as long as the Russians deem it prudent to stay away, they don't need to. According to the Guardian,

Maritime tracking services showed a logjam of ships waiting to pass into the Danube since a second route through the Bystre estuary was opened after the recent Russian retreat from the nearby Snake Island.

. . . Although large carriers cannot pass through the Bystre estuary, limiting the amount of grain that can be exported, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday that already 16 ships had transited the Bystre route in the four days since it reopened.

. . . Until recently, the Bystre estuary route had been closed, but that has changed with the removal of Russian forces from Snake Island.

It seems to me that conventional thinking would have been that Ukraine needed to reoccupy Snake Island for this to take place, while all that was really needed was for Russia to stay away. Ukraine got the desired result, a partial end to the Russian blockade of its Black Sea ports, without the need to reoccupy and defend Snake Island. We're seeing similar thinking in analysis of the war's current phase, for instance in the Financial Times:

“Russia could still wear down Ukrainian ammunition stockpiles, its reserve of skilled troops and the patience of the international community to slowly claw back a path towards meeting its aims,” wrote two researchers, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, in a report for the London-based Royal United Services Institute last week.

As well as a chronic shortage of artillery ammunition, they highlighted multiple other Ukrainian weaknesses, including a lack of skilled infantry and armoured vehicles to conduct offensive operations, a shortage of secure radio equipment and an inability to detect and take out Russian electronic warfare capabilities.

The implicit assumption is that Ukraine needs a large conventional force of "skilled infantry and armoured vehicles to conduct offensive operations" in order to push the Russians back in the Donbas. But the same implied logic would have required just as large a force for the Ukrainians to push the Russians away from Kyiv, or presumably a navy just as large as the Russians' to drive them away from Snake Island. That wan't needed in either case. Ukraine drove the Russians off Snake Island with no navy.

The UK Ministry of Defence suggests the idea of a large-scale Ukrainian conventional counteroffensive in the Donbas may also miss the point:

Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 14 July 2022

Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/ooeYS0oJa7

🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/3TkIw6XCNU

— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) July 14, 2022

We can stipulate that, as the Institute for the Study of War continues to report, as of yesterday,

Russia’s operational pause largely continued, with limited Russian ground assaults along the Slovyansk-Siversk-Bakhmut salient.

But especially in the context of the UK Ministry of Defence's estimate above, the ISW's conclusion simply doesn't follow:

The Russians will likely launch a larger-scale and more determined offensive along the Slovyansk-Siversk-Bakhmut line soon, but there are no indications yet of how soon that attack will begin or exactly where it will focus.

The UK MoD instead suggests the Russians are in danger of losing momentum due to their "operational pause", which due to their aging vehicles, weapons, and Soviet-era tactics they're unlikely to regain. In other words, we're back to the 40-mile convoy that one day may start moving, and when they do, watch out!

However, a problem with the "operational pause" theory is that it attempts to explain only the circumstance that the Russians must refit and redeploy after taking Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. It doesn't factor in the effect of longer-range NATO weapons in forcing the Russian supply and command centers farther to the rear:

Since Ukraine received the first far-reaching weapons such as HIMARS and M270, there was no safe place for russian supplies. The invaders’ stocks of ammunition and fuel began to disappear one after another creating problems for the frontline logistics.

So they try to hide warehouses away, relocating them deeper in the rear, as stated by a Ukrainian General Staff official Oleksii Hromov during a briefing at Media Center Ukraine.

. . . "Currently, the possibility of locating the enemy’s brigade-level warehouses at a distance of 100 kilometers from the front line is being considered, and corps-level warehouses – at 150 kilometers from the front line."

This forces the Russians to put increasing strain on their weak logistical operations. In fact, I'm of the view that this is the factor behind the "operational pause", not some desire to resupply or reorganize -- the Russians have fewer and fewer resources to do that with in any case.