The Pandemic Is Over!

As the saying goes, you don't have dementia if you forget your keys. You have dementia if you forget what your keys are for. President Brandon seems to have stepped all over not just his allies but his diplomatic advisers in Sunday's 60 Minutes interview , but I see no signs of dementia.

The reaction at the Daily Kos was predictable to his announcement that the pandemic is over: 'You’re counting votes.' We are 'counting bodies': Experts outraged at Biden deeming pandemic over. But nobody seems to dispute that he was aware of his surroundings, knew this was a television interview, and was more or less aware of the questions and giving answers that reflected the overall context.

The problem was that he basically hadn't done the prep. The public health establishment is at the very best deeply divided over what to do next with the pandemic; over the summer, it became clear that the public is fed up with vax and masks, and it quietly backed off on threats to reimpose indoor masking in LA County. On the other hand, the FDA has just authorized yet another set of COVID boosters, and the CDC is beginning the push for a new round of vax. From the redoubtable Dr Walensky:

“The updated COVID-19 boosters are formulated to better protect against the most recently circulating COVID-19 variant. They can help restore protection that has waned since previous vaccination and were designed to provide broader protection against newer variants. This recommendation followed a comprehensive scientific evaluation and robust scientific discussion. If you are eligible, there is no bad time to get your COVID-19 booster and I strongly encourage you to receive it.”

Think of the hit to Big Pharma's bottom line if COVID goes away! Nobody seems to have briefed the big guy about this, or if they did, he didn't listen, or he didn't think of it when it came up. He forgot the keys, but he didn't forget what the keys were for. The same applies to his remarks on Taiwan:

President Joe Biden in an interview that aired Sunday said US military personnel would defend Taiwan if the Chinese military were to launch an invasion of the democratically ruled island, in comments that yet again appear to venture beyond the longstanding US policy on the issue.

The comments on CBS’s “60 Minutes” reiterate a pledge to defend Taiwan that Biden has previously made, though Sunday he specified that “US men and women” would be involved in the effort.

In an interview, Biden was asked whether “US forces, US men and women, would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion,” a prospect US officials privately fear is becoming more likely.

“Yes,” Biden said.

It’s not the first time Biden has gone further in his public comments than the longstanding US approach of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to the defense of Taiwan. Most recently, during a visit to Tokyo in May, Biden said the US would intervene militarily if China attempts to take Taiwan by force.

The White House has been quick to downplay Biden’s previous comments on Taiwan, reiterating that US policy hasn’t changed, and on Sunday, “60 Minutes” reported receiving a similar response to Biden’s answers in their interview.

I would actually say that in both cases, Biden's remarks reflect sounder policy than the conventional wisdom with which he may have been briefed, and it's very likely in the interests of everyone but Beijing to have US policy on defending Taiwan a worrisome matter. And beyond any question, not only do we need to be done with COVID, but everything from the lab leak to the lockdowns needs to be thoroughly investigated to prevent it happening again, something on which Biden will never follow through.

None of the excitement, though, means there's any actual daylight between Biden and the public health or diplomaic elites. Biden isn't any sort of closet moderate. In a meeting with his handlers the next day, he'll be just as likely to insist the pandemic is raging on, and nobody with any sense would promise Taiwan will be defended with US troops. The problem is that Biden isn't much different from his vice president when it comes to reading his briefings, and when he gets out in public without his minders, he simply wings it. He's just unprepared. This applies as well to his warning to Putin about nukes:

", , , I wonder, Mr. President, what you would say to [Putin] if he is considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons."

"Don't. Don't. Don't. . . " Mr. Biden said.

"Don't. Don't. Don't," is what victims say just before they're shot. One of the talking-head retired generals, I forget which, remarked that it would have been much better if Biden had said nothing. But it was what it was.

I'm not sure if, on balance, Dubya was much smarter than Biden, but he was at least more diligent, he did his homework, and he listened to Dick Cheney, for whatever that was worth. Biden's problem is that he's dumb as a rock and lazy, and beyond that, he's entitled. He's all those, but none of them is a medical issue.

Trump On Putin

Yesterday, I noted that prior to the first weeks of the Russo-Ukraine War, there was an effective consensus that Russia was the second-strongest military power and a near peer to the US and NATO. Trump has had a fair amount of criticism for remarks earlier this year that have been interpreted as "praising Putin", but I think if we take them in context of prevailing world opinion, they don't strike me as unusual. This piece at CNN lists some of Trump's remarks on Putin from last spring:

At a campaign rally in Georgia [March 26], the former President, again, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart. And I actually thought he was going to be negotiating. I said, ‘That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 soldiers on the border.’”

Trump added that Putin made a “big mistake,” but that “it looked like a great negotiation.”

I find this hard to fault, given the assumptions pretty much everyone in public life had about Putin up to the failure of the February invasion. He had a powerful army. Ukraine had been in the news chiefly for Burisma and its $50,000 a month payments to Hunter Biden, which suggested the country was a hopelessly corrupt backwater in the Afghan league. Putin's demand on the face of it was simply that the West provide assurance that Ukraine would enter neither the EU nor NATO and continue to serve as a neutral buffer for Russia. Putin's stick would be that Russian tanks would roll into Kyiv, and any effort by the West to stop this would be an overextension.

Earlier in the war, this position was at least arguable. In May, Pope Francis said,

“NATO barking at Russia’s doors” may have raised alarms in the Kremlin about the Western European alliance’s intentions in Ukraine. “I can’t say if (Russia’s) anger was provoked,” he continued, “but facilitated, maybe yes.”

What permanently changed the consensus on Putin's intentions was the revelation of Russian atrocities in places like Bucha following its withdrawal from the Kyiv region in April, which showed that Putin didn't in practice want Ukraine to be a neutral buffer, but instead was willing to exterminate some large part of its population and pillage its modest wealth. Even Pope Francis's public statements have hardened toward Russia since that time. However, at the time of the invasion and its runup, nobody prominent in public life foresaw that outcome. In a February 22 interview, two days before the invasion on February 24, Trump said,

BUCK [SEXTON]: Mr. President, in the last 24 hours we know Russia has said that they are recognizing two breakaway regions of Ukraine, and now this White House is stating that this is an “invasion.” That’s a strong word. What went wrong here? What has the current occupant of the Oval Office done that he could have done differently?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn’t be there and a man that has no concept of what he’s doing. I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. (sarcastic)

So, Putin is now saying, “It’s independent,” a large section of Ukraine. I said, “How smart is that?” And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, “I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,” he used the word “independent,” “and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad.

Trump at that stage, before any tanks had actually rolled in, was relying on Putin's public statements as an indication of his strategy, and it's worth noting that if that was all that happened -- Putin entered disputed regions exclusively as a "peacekeeping" force -- the situation would have been far less clear and Putin's position at least more sustainable. And Trump's later remarks quoted above a month later, March 26, support this view: Putin made a “big mistake” in an all-out invasion, but in the days immediately prior, “it looked like a great negotiation.” Later in the February 22 interview, Trump said,

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, even “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd said this weekend during his show — I was watching it for a change and he said — (summarized), “How come there’s been no invasion during the period of time that the Trump administration was there but they did invade — very severely invade — with Obama and then they waited and then they invaded?”

This would never have happened if we were there. But he did. Chuck Todd asked that question. How come there was none of this happening during the Trump administration? I knew Putin very well. I got along with him great. He liked me. I liked him. I mean, you know, he’s a tough cookie, got a lot of the great charm and a lot of pride. But the way he — and he loves his country, you know? He loves his country. He’s acting a little differently I think now.

This again is consistent with observations by other prominent figures like Condoleeza Rice that Putin has changed and is not the person they worked with. And Trump is saying this two days before the actual invasion, when the extent of Putin's miscalculation was completely unknown. Some of these remarks have been taken out of context, including by President Zelensky as recently as a week ago:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was surprised by former President Trump’s continued praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin even after Moscow invaded Ukraine, given how much information Trump was privy to about the fellow world leader.

“I believe he had enough time, plenty of time, to understand who Putin is,” Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview aired Sunday.

. . . “Ukraine in his eyes is too far away. But this war has no distances it could not cover, so I believe he needs to look at the situation without, as we say, pink glasses on,” Zelensky said, per CNN’s translation.

However, as of March 15, a little over two weeks after the invasion, Trump said,

“I’m surprised — I’m surprised. I thought he was negotiating when he sent his troops to the border. I thought he was negotiating,” Trump told the outlet in a phone interview. “I thought it was a tough way to negotiate but a smart way to negotiate.”

. . . “I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with — you know, like every trade deal. We’ve never made a good trade deal until I came along,” Trump said. “And then he went in — and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”

As far as I can tell, these remarks are the bulk of what Trump has said since the invasion. I would guess that Zelensky has been shown only what Trump said in the February 22 interview, and that's the basis for his comments this month. We'll have to see what else Trump may eventually have to say about Ukraine in light of more recent developments, but from what we currently have, once he became more fully aware of the actual circumstances, his position has been that Putin has changed and is not the negotiating genius he once thought.

The State Of Commentary On The War

The Austrian Col Markus Reisner is still highly regarded as a war analyst on reddit, but as I've noted, although he certainly looks the part, his recent commentary has been largely irrelevant, overtaken by events, and even disingenuous. On the other hand, the eponymous Kos at the left-wing Daily Kos has been consistently the most insightful and predictive throughout the war. Let's take an example. Here's last night's analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, which is actually a cut above their usual performance:

Russian forces continue to conduct meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut instead of focusing on defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives that continue to advance. Russian troops continue to attack Bakhmut and various villages near Donetsk City of emotional significance to pro-war residents of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) but little other importance. . . . The Russians cannot hope to make gains around Bakhmut or Donetsk City on a large enough scale to derail Ukrainian counteroffensives and appear to be continuing an almost robotic effort to gain ground in Donetsk Oblast that seems increasingly divorced from the overall realities of the theater.

There's some furrowing of the brow and stroking of the chin, but no real attempt to explain why. As of early this morning, Kos does a much better job with the same material:

It’s patently absurd that at the same time that Ukraine is notching gains in Kherson, Kharkiv, and northern Luhansk Oblasts, Russia is wasting time, men, and material pushing forward in a region that offers no strategic payoff.

Indeed, the original point of attacking this front was to form the southern claw of a pincer movement that would’ve trapped tens of thousands of entrenched Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. . . . This pincer plan was the reason Russia pushed hard into Izyum, at great logistical cost.

. . . Still, as long as they held Izyum, Russia could maintain the fiction that pushing hard in Donetsk oblast made some kind of military sense. But now that Izyum is liberated, what exactly is the military reason to continue this self-destructive behavior?

This in fact is the unmentioned elephant in the room of Col Reisner's latest YouTube commentary -- in his prior July presentation, he stressed the Russian pincer strategy and strongly implied its likelihood of success. But faced with the Russian withdrawal from Izyum, Col Reisner has simply dropped any further mention of the pincers. But let's return to Kos's question, why are the Russians continuing to attack at the southern claw of the pincer when the northern claw is no longer in play?

The reason is simple: Russia isn’t actually in charge in this corner of the front.

This is Wagner PMC (private military contractor) territory. Russian forces lack a unified command: there’s the Russian army (divided into sectors led by separate military districts), VDV (airborne)corps, Luhansk proxies, Donetsk proxies, Rosgvardia (Putin’s personal army, the national guard), the Chechen Kadyrovites, and Wagner mercenaries.

So we laughed at pro-Russian sources for celebrating the capture of that hill near Kodema while the entire northern front was collapsing. Yet they were genuinely celebrating in Wagner circles. . . . Wagner’s corporate leadership apparently decided that “we’re the only group in Russia making progress” was a much better business development slogan than “we’re all in this together.”

Kos concludes that Russian strategy is a [redacted]. This is certainly a better explanation -- or maybe I should say, simply an explanation, in the absence of any from Col Reisner or the ISW -- but why is this insight still so rare and hard to reach? I think it's still reasonable to ask why US and Western strategic analysis generally saw the Russian military as a near-peer to the US and NATO. Let's keep iin mind that before February, Trump was hardly unique in seeing Putin as a negotiating genius in threatening to invade Ukraine -- Trump thought it was a legitimate trade for Putin to offer the status quo in Ukraine in return for a Western agreement to keep Ukraine out of NATO and the EU.

That assessment in turn was based on the prewar consensus that a Russian invasion would see tanks in Kyiv in a matter of days. I believe that if you'd asked anyone, Trump, Biden, Obama, Boris Johnson, Merkel, Macron, whomever, you'd have had agreement on that outcome. Yet within weeks of the actual invasion, it emerged that a third-rate power could fight the putative near-peer to the US and NATO to a standstill with improvised hand-held weapons and cheap drones.

This in fact has been a lesson for the US in misapplied spending. So far, we've spent $15 billion in the Ukraine war that's likely to end permanently any assumption that Russia is our military near-peer. In comparison, the futile Afghanistan exercise cost over $2 trillion, nearly $300 million a day. It failed to defeat the Taliban and had little perceptible impact over and above the two Iraq wars in containing Islamism. My calculator says $300 million a day is about $110 billion a year. The money we've spent in Ukraine, and the money we're likely to spend, will be far more of a bargain.

On top of that, initial hesitation on matters like supplying Ukraine with secondhand Migs via third parties or giving them heavy artillery on the basis that such moves would provoke Putin and start World War III also proved misguided, as did assumptions that Ukraine's military was just as corrupt and incompetent as Russia's. What was the source of these miscalculations on our part?

That's the real question worth pursuing.

The Ivy League Hasn't Changed

Every couple of decades I seem to run into something that conveys the essence of the Ivy League as I experienced it as an undergraduate. My wife normally removes all communications from my alma mater from the incoming mail and quietly throws them out before I can see them, but around 20 years ago, she missed an invitation from a local alumni group to attend a lecture from one of the "superstar" (their word) professors who'd be visiting. I decided to attend. The lecture was so awful that I wound up getting involved in the ill-fated Dartmouth alumni trustee movement to see what I might do to change things. At least I didn't get a heart attack, and that's a different story anyhow, but it's an indicator of why my wife normally keeps that sort of thing away from me.

Just lately, Yale has been running a series of YouTube lectures on Ukraine by one of their own superstars, Timothy Snyder. There's a link to one of them at the top of this post. I watched it, because I somehow expected worthwhile insight on Ukraine, but the puzzling thing was that there was actually almost no useful information about Ukraine in it. (In contrast, Ukraine historian Rabbi Henry Abramson's YouTube channel has far better presentations on Ukraine history and the current war.)

But if you watch any of the Timothy Snyder YouTubes on Ukraine, several strange things pop out. The first, from the context of remarks and asides he makes throughout the lectures, is that this is apparently a first-semester course for first-year undergraduates, and that's a little off, because on one hand, I would have expected (if I were a first-semester, first-year undergraduate) to be hearing insights into the current conflict based on the concrete experience of someone who's been there and been involved. Not a bit of it; if you want that, go watch Rabbi Abramson.

Instead, Prof Synder's lectures are peppered with digressions and asides that are clearly intended just to flatter the audience, who are, after all, impressionable kids who've just arrived on campus -- and beyond that, they've already been primed with the expectation that they've been selected in a rigorous, merit-based process that's filtered each one of them out as the crème de la crème -- they've been effectively told this in their acceptance letters. Snyder's lectures in fact contain a running joke that in effect,"You've been waiting to learn what special things you learn in a Yale class -- well, here it is. It's complicated!"

And on one hand, this is the great post-modern insight. What is a nation? Who knows? Philosophers just keep asking. How does a nation form? Who knows? It's complicated! And anyone who thinks he knows the answer is probably a Trumpist, which is what we definitely are not here. But then he switches to a sort of quasi-Hegelian formulation that there is in fact a universal three-phase national myth, a golden time of the founding, followed by a time when the founding principles were corrupted, which leads us to the present, when we are called to return to the principles of the founding.

Somehow, Ivy undergraduates are always expected to draw quasi-Hegelian conclusions, or maybe to have quasi-Hegelian conclusions drawn for them.

Snyder feels that Putinism represents this quasi-Hegelian national myth for Russia, which calls them to purify the Rus by invading Ukraine. But Trump also promotes this myth for the US in the form of MAGA, which is as destructive as Putinism. QED or something. What on earth does this have to do with the Ukraine war? And does this three-phase myth apply to Ukraine itself? If so, how? If not, why not? Well, apparently it's complicated, because Snyder won't go into it.

Oddly, Snyder encourages the class to interrupt him with questions, but nobody does. I think the answer is he's showing them how to be good Ivy Leaguers, and they aren't going to dispute it; they're there to drink the Kool-Aid, after all. If I had been in the class, though, here's the question I'd ask: "Physicists can differ on whether quantum physics or particle physics explains the world, but neither one affects how we drive a car. You can say everything's complicated, and there's a three-phase national myth, but how does that affect how we make policy? Is there any way we can come out of this class with a clearer idea of what we should be doing in Ukraine?"

My experience as an Ivy undergraduate, as well as an adult who's been through a graduate program and later occasionally interacted with Ivy League professors, is that the professor will become upset with that sort of question, dismiss it or trivialize it with a joke, and refuse to engage further. The subject of the lecture is not what might be the best Ukraine policy, the subject of the lecture is how to be an Ivy Leaguer.

I've remarked here now and then that a few weeks into my first semester at Dartmouth, I went to the dean of freshmen first-year and told him I thought there'd been a terrible mistake. He convinced me to stick it through, but I never thought I was wrong. And if you want to learn about Ukraine, listen to Rabbi Abramson, not Prof Snyder.

Solzhenitsyn And Orthodoxy

I discovered a wide-ranging, multipart esasay by Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn in the USA, which can be found on the web but was first published in Church and State No.122, Oct-Dec 2015. His treatment of the subject is multidimensional and something I hadn't previously encountered, but it answers a lot of questions that had been in the back of my mind.

I've read a lot of Solzhenitsyn, including all of The Gulag Archipelago, much of it at least twice. It came out in English in the mid-1970s, subtitled "an experiment in literary investigation", not long after I discovered Milton's prose, to which I think it bears a close if unintentional relation. Solzhenitsyn and Milton were deeply religious men, if highly idiosyncratic in their views, who bent literary genre to their highly idiosyncratic purposes. As a writer, I fell under the influence of both.

Now in the context of the Russo-Ukraine War, there seems to be an emerging if so far inchoate movement to reevaluate Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn as Russian Orthodox writers whose views on Orthodoxy can't encompass or explain a Russian invasion of Ukraine that in its near-genocidal brutality has drawn comparison to the German invasion of 1941, yet has been endorsed without question by the Orthodox authorities in Moscow. This has caused a schism within Orthodoxy, but there are ripples beyund just the Orthodox, because for instance, Anglicans draw prestige as a senior Christian denomination by likening themselves to Orthodox as apostolic and sacramental, but with a separate national identity.

If Orthodoxy fails, so much the more do Anglicans, at least to the extent they haven't failed already. I think Pope Francis sees opportunities here but is treading carefully indeed.

The Peter Brooke essay covers a great deal more than Orthodoxy in its treatment of Solzhenitsyn as a specifically Cold War figure. In one section of the essay, RICHARD PIPES AND 'OLD RUSSIA' he outlines Richard Pipes's position in US intelligence:

In the 1970s, when Solzhenitsyn was in despair over the American defeat in Vietnam (did he have any idea of the means by which America was waging war in Vietnam?) and urging the US to stand firm against Communism, Pipes was running 'Team B', set up by the then head of the CIA, George Bush (Sr), to second guess the conclusions that were being drawn by the American intelligence community that the Soviet Union was in economic difficulties which were having an unfavourable effect on its military capacity. It therefore posed less of a military threat, a conclusion that was naturally unwelcome to the US military establishment and the armaments industry. Team B was set up by the then Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and included among its members a younger Paul Wolfowitz. It was the model for the later 'Office of Special Plans', set up by Wolfowitz in 2002, also under Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defence, to undermine the CIA's assessment that the Iraqi government had little or nothing in the way of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

In the 1970s, then, Pipes and Solzhenitsyn could be described as (to use an old Marxist Leninist term) 'objective' allies in opposition to the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

One surprise of the Russo-Ukraine war has clearly been the weakness and incompetence of the Russian military, which appears to have been foreshadowed by the internal conflicts in US intelligence in the 1970s. Yet Solzhenitsyn, to the extent that he tried to become a US political figure while he was here, effectively allied himself with the neoconservatives who promoted the idea that Russia was a world power comparable to the US. But Brooke goes on to point out that Solzhenitsyn actually isn't very Orthodox:

I discussed Solzhenitsyn's somewhat ambiguous attitude to historic Orthodoxy in an article published in 2010 in the online Dublin Review of Books, and I feel I can't do better than to repeat what I wrote then:

'The major theme of the Templeton Address, which Solzhenitsyn gave in 1984, is that the horrors that surround us derive from our loss of a sense of responsibility to something higher than ourselves - to God: "If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty millions of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

. . . Indeed, given the importance Solzhenitsyn attaches to religion, there is something a little odd about his attitude to the Orthodox Church ... Although he often refers to the martyrdom of the priests, monks and nuns of the Orthodox Church under Bolshevism, there are very few priests mentioned in The Gulag Archipelago.

. . . When he does mention the Orthodox Church he is often critical of it. One of his recurring themes is the sin which the Church committed in its persecution of the Old Believers - Orthodox Christians who refused to accept certain reforms of liturgical practice that were introduced in the seventeenth century. Without ever going into it very deeply Solzhenitsyn several times refers to the Old Believers as representing the genuine spirit of Old Russia. He sees the reforms of Peter the Great (when the supposedly independent patriarchate of Moscow was suppressed and the Church reduced to being a department of state after the manner of the Church of England) as an extension of the crime committed against the Old Believers.

So for Solzhenitsyn, Orthodoxy is something of a reified entity that represents some authentic quality of the past that's no longer present, which sorta-kinda explains the USSR (but not present-day Russia, apparently). Beyond that, Brooke suggests that Solzhenitsyn at least leaned toward a view that only a version of Christianity that had a centralized authority in opposition to the State -- i.e., Roman Catholicism -- could succeed against the USSR at the time he wrote. But post-USSR Putin, the apparent majority of present-day Russians, and much of the Western right continue to be of the view that a State-sonsored conservative Russian Orthodoxy will save the world from dissipation, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a righteous instrument of this view.

We simply don't know how Solzhenitsyn would react to Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. Brooke's tentative conclusion seems to be that Solzhenitsyn, like Dostoevsky, was not ultimately a rationalist, and it's hard to avoid thinking Solzhenitsyn's view would be emotionally pro-Russian, bolstered by an incomplete understanding of Orthodoxy, although I'm not sure if there can on fact be a rationalist justification for Orthodoxy at all. But that's a different subject. The big problem I see for now is that an essentially emotional view of Russia and Russian Orthodoxy can't survive the current war.

The Lacey Spears Case, Gender Dysphoria, And Munchausen By Proxy

Last night, my wife and I watched a true crime show on the Lacey Spears case, in which Spears, a single mother desperate for attention, wildly overshared on social media about her son Garnett's health struggles. Garnett passed away at the age of 5 from high levels of sodium leading to swelling in his brain. On March 2, 2015, a jury found Spears guilty of murdering her son by poisoning him with table salt, which she had administered to him from infancy through his feeding tube.

The case has become a well-known example of Munchausen by proxy:

Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick.

Most discussions attribute its motivation to attention-seeking by the mother, but in another case, the Dee Dee Blancard murder, the mother exploited her daughter's putative handicaps and disabilities to live entirely on charitable donations and public assisstance. She was able to represent her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, as much younger than her actual age due to "medical" treatments that disfigured her and stunted her growth.

Many people who met Gypsy were charmed by her. Her 5-foot (150 cm) height, nearly-toothless mouth, large glasses and high, childlike voice reinforced the perception that she had all the problems her mother claimed she did. Gypsy often wore wigs or hats to cover her baldness; her mother regularly shaved Gypsy's head to mimic the hairless appearance of a chemotherapy patient, allegedly telling Gypsy that since her medication would eventually cause her hair to fall out, it was best to shave it in advance. When they left the house, Dee Dee often took an oxygen tank and feeding tube with them; Gypsy was fed the children's liquid nutrition supplement PediaSure well into her 20s.

. . . Dee Dee seems to have at least once forged a copy of her daughter's birth certificate, moving her birth date to 1995 to bolster claims that she was still a teenager; Gypsy said in a later interview that for 15 years she was not sure of her real age. She sometimes also claimed that the original had been destroyed during the post-Katrina flooding. Dee Dee did keep another copy with Gypsy's actual birth date. Her daughter recalls seeing it during one of their hospital visits and becoming confused; Dee Dee told her it was a misprint.

The Dee Dee Blanchard case ended when Gypsy Rose met a man online and prevailed on him to murder her mother. A remark in the TV program on the Lacey Spears case mentioned that Munchausen-by-proxy mothers must normally kill their victims in childhood before they can figure out what's being done to them; Garnett Lacey is an example of the norm, while Gypsy Rose Blanchard illustrates the danger of not doing this. Her mother Dee Dee probably delayed killing her daughter because continuing the game brought her significant financial benefits, while we must assume Lacey Spears exploited her son's condition primarily for attention and could dispose of him more easily.

The big thing I noticed in the Garnett Spears program happened because I wasn't paying full attention: There were lots of video clips of the child as a toddler, since the mother was a social media oversharer. Somehow I missed references early in the program to Garnett's gender, and throughout the first part of the show, I thought Garnett was a girl. This is clear in the photo at the top of this post, Garnett clearly has a girl's hairstyle, and in most of the videos, he's wearing only a diaper, so there was no gender-specific clothing.

There was a time, of course, when boys didn't have their hair cut or begin to wear trousers until they were roughly Garnett's age when he died. In this case, his mother seems to have wanted to keep him in a more innocuous female state, although she always identified him as her son, until he reached the age when she'd need to dispose of him in any case.

This brings me to the question of early childhood gender dysphoria, where certain children are encouraged to believe well before puberty that they're the wrong gender, and puberty blockers and pre-surgical therapies are prescribed. According to Wikipedia,

Gender dysphoria in children (GD), also known as gender incongruence of childhood, is a formal diagnosis for children who experience significant discontent (gender dysphoria) due to a mismatch between their assigned sex and gender identity. The diagnostic label gender identity disorder in children (GIDC) was used by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until it was renamed gender dysphoria in children in 2013 with the release of the DSM-5. The diagnosis was renamed to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder.

The problem I have with this whole idea is that a child with gender dysphoria can never be anything but a proxy for some adult, either a parent or a school official acting in place of a parent and approving and supervising the child's medical treatment. There is no assurance that the parent isn't effectively running a Munchausen con for attention, and there's also no assurance that school officials promoting such treatment aren't simply making a good living from the game.

An individual who undergoes hormone or surgical treatment for gender dysphoria effectively becomes a permanent medical patient, bad for the individual, good for unethical doctors and school officials, good as well for attention-seeking parents. For some parents, the idea of delaying puberty or transforming a potentially disruptive boy into a more agreeable girl would also bring benefits, no matter how damaging to the child.

And at this point, we've had little experience with what happens to children who've been through this therapy. I've got to think there are more Gypsy Rose Blanchards waiting to emerge in these cases.

The Return Of Colonel Reisner

Somehow I've always had a soft spot for Austria, in some measure due to its consistent history since the death of Prince Metternich of getting things about as wrong as they could be gotten, but in a charming, lost-cause sort of way. An example of what I like about Austria is Federal Army Col Markus Reisner's YouTube commentaries on the Russo-Ukraine War, which originally struck me as impressive, but of which I've been skeptical since his more recent ones. He's actually been silent since early July; for comparison, that presentation is below.

This was a generally pessimistic assessment for the Ukrainian side -- the only favorable factor he saw for Ukraine was that it had kept control of Kyiv, while he foresaw increasing Russian efforts to close one or more cauldrons in Donbas, relying especially on closing a pincer from Popasna north and Izyum south. He saw attrition as a key factor, and he especially saw attrition as a factor that would minimize the effects of the heavy weapons like HIMARS that only then were being introduced.

What appears to have developed instead was an attritional advantage for Ukraine. After the Russian advance into Lysychansk in early July, which Col Reisner stressed as a key event, there was little movement on that front, although there were continuing small-scale Russian attacks that in effect ground down Russian forces with little to show for the losses.

Instead, throughout July, Ukraine began to stress its putative buildup for a counterattack in Kherson presumably to begin in August, with attention focused on HIMARS attacks on key bridges over the Dnieper. Ukraine was completely successful in deflecting attention from its actual buildup in Kharkiv, the outcome of which currently bids to be an offensive comparable to the Falaise Pocket in 1944. Col Reisner's mention of the comparison is grudging indeed.

On the other hand, he doesn't mention at all the circumstance that the rout of the Russian strongpoint at Izyum completely eliminates any current likelihood of Russia closing a cauldron between there and Popasna, that he predicted as of early July.

At the end of his latest YouTube, he explains that he hasn't been making as many presentations because he's been put in command of the Honor Guard in Vienna. According to Wikipedia,

The Gardebataillon ("Guard Battalion") is a ceremonial unit in the Austrian Armed Forces. The Gardebataillon is one of the most important military units in the Austrian Armed Forces as its main task is to represent Austria at home and abroad. It is stationed exclusively at Maria Theresien Barracks in Vienna.

I see. The ceremonial battalion is one of the most important in the Austrian armed forces, and Col Reisner is now in full-time command. He certainly looks the part. I guess this is why I have a soft spot for Austria.

It's just as well he isn't advising President Zelensky.