The Lizard People Aren't Happy About Ukraine, And They Think It's Biden's Fault

I've seen some intriguing data points over the past day that are giving me some ideas about what the people who really run the show are thinking. First, the US State Department, Antony Blinken (net worth $65 million, although the Blinken family controls far more), Secretary, has had to spank President Brandon yet again for un-vetted remarks:

Biden made the offending comments at a Democrat Party event at a private home in California last week.

Offering disorganized remarks commenting on nuclear weapons generally, Biden mentioned Pakistan amid boasting yet again that he has a close personal relationship with dictator Xi Jinping of China.

. . . “This is a guy [Xi] who understands what he wants but has an enormous, enormous array of problems. How do we handle that?” the president asked. “How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.”

. . . Following the publication of the event’s official transcript, Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry immediately summoned the U.S. Ambassador to Islamabad Donal Blome and requested the ambassador deliver a demarche on President Biden’s comments.

. . . Principal Deputy Spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State Vendal Patel addressed the growing scandal on Tuesday, telling reporters, “the United States is confident of Pakistan’s commitment and its ability to secure nuclear assets.”

The problem with weird Uncle Joe is that not only does he fondle nymphets and sniff their hair at whim, but he runs his mouth uncontrollably, and this is starting to look dangerous:

President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are slated to attend next month’s G-20 summit in Indonesia, setting up the possibility of a high-stakes face off in the midst of an increasingly deadly Moscow invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. officials are taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The story delicately skirts the question of how the anonymous "US officials" feel about the potential for spontaneous gaffes from the big guy that could lead the already unpredictable Putin to escalate, but the problem must certainly be behind their maneuvers.

It can’t be ruled out that Biden and Putin might cross paths at some point during the November summit, according to officials who note that the two men may, at some point, attend the same large plenary gathering. But U.S. officials have ruled out a formal meeting and are taking steps to ensure that the American president does not encounter his Russian counterpart in a hallway or even in a leaders’ group photo.

I'll grant that some Harvard alums do show prudence and common sense. After two years, they've got Biden's measure, and they've remembered Stein's Law: that which cannot continue must stop. Other indications show behind-the-scenes discomfort with how difficult it is to control his runaweay mouth. This story quotes the New York Times behind a paywall:

After Mr. Biden delivered a nearly two-hour news conference in January, members of his senior staff were rehashing the appearance in the Treaty Room when the first lady appeared.

She pointedly asked the group, which included the president, why nobody stepped in to stop it, according to a person who was in the room. Where was the person, she demanded, who was supposed to end the news conference?

The story goes on,

As the New York Post observed, that was the infamous [January 20, 2022] presser where Joe Biden greatly alarmed Ukraine by appearing to greenlight a “minor incursion” into the country by Russia, the latter of which was already sending strong signals that they would do much more than that. His handlers had to step in on to rescue Joe on that statement, too.

. . . It’s no wonder there are reports swirling of “contingency plans” being put in place by Democrats ahead of 2024. Joe Biden is a man who is simply not in control much anymore in any meaningful way, not in what he says nor in the way he behaves around others, all of which again raises the question as to just who or what group of people are actually taking the lead in the absence of his failures to do so?

The Lizard People are not happy about Ukraine. The hard-core globalists don't like the unpredictability -- the post-World War II balance of power has completely disappeared, while what the world will look like going forward isn't clear at all. The war itrself is a distraction, forcing choices over matters like green energy that the globalists don't want on the agenda. Beyond that, it's brought forward a charismatic and unpredictable leader in President Zelensky who is effectively forcing an independent diplomatic and military agenda on NATO and the EU. At the same time, feckless and colorless Western leadership in figures like Biden and Liz Truss damages the existing consensus.

I think if you were to press the globalists, they wouldn't be that far from the US Right in opposing Western aid to Ukraine. But with the damage done, they'll likely be insistent on seeing the Russians ejected quickly and some form of new, if temporary and inadequate, order imposed.

And it's not hard to trace responsibility for the Ukraine problem ito Biden's disastrous retreat from Afghanistan and smaller issues like his "minor incursion" remarks. As I've said before, Antony Blinken is a member of the power elite comparable to Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller in a prior generation. I think the lizard people have made up their minds; they may even be forced to back a Republican in 2024. At least, a Republican of the right sort.

How Francis Fukuyama Helped Me To Understand The Force

I had one of those nights last night when I woke up with the feeling I hadn't fully figured something out. It clearly stemmed from Francis Fukuyama's Atlantic essay that I linked yesterday. I would summarize it via the following excerpts. First,

[Russia and China] were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador.

But we mustn't lose heart. Indeed,

The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. . . . When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with ["the end of history"] in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

So we get to the first inklings of a puzzle: authoritarian systems seem to have gained ground, and progress is neither linear nor automatic, but there's an "underlying narrative". Isn't that peculiar? We have an educated consensus that the world is essentially random (for example, in Darwinian theory), but there's nevertheless an "underlying narrative" that resulted in homo sapiens and eventually his Whig institutions, sort of. Don't ask me to explain, but Mr Fukuyama has apparently signed on to this. And he cites Hegel as his authority, which is important.

This is simply because Hegel has an "underlying narrative" that's generally consistent with 19th-century bourgeois secular optimism, and Hegelian dialectic is at the root of Fukuyama's confusion. I went looking for an explanation of Hegelian dialectic and found this in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Dialectics” is a term used to describe a method of philosophical argument that involves some sort of contradictory process between opposing sides. In what is perhaps the most classic version of “dialectics”, the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. . . . [t]he back-and-forth dialectic between Socrates and his interlocutors thus becomes Plato’s way of arguing against the earlier, less sophisticated views or positions and for the more sophisticated ones later.

Whereas Plato’s “opposing sides” were people (Socrates and his interlocutors), however, what the “opposing sides” are in Hegel’s work depends on the subject matter he discusses.

. . . Note that, although Hegel acknowledged that his dialectical method was part of a philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato, he criticized Plato’s version of dialectics. He argued that Plato’s dialectics deals only with limited philosophical claims and is unable to get beyond skepticism or nothingness. . . . Hegel argues that, because Plato’s dialectics cannot get beyond arbitrariness and skepticism, it generates only approximate truths, and falls short of being a genuine science.

. . . Dialectics drives to the “Absolute”, to use Hegel’s term, which is the last, final, and completely all-encompassing or unconditioned concept or form in the relevant subject matter under discussion (logic, phenomenology, ethics/politics and so on).

So where Plato via Socrates will go only so far as to say, "this is absurd, it's a contradiction, we can't go there", Hegel says yes, we certainly can, because something new, inexorable, and absolute will arise from this contradiction. For Fukuyama, this is Whig History, "the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress" as a teleological process, the "underlying narrative".

The problem for Fukuyama throughout the essay is that there are too many real-world obstacles to his Whig underlying narrative -- and of these, the greatest is Donald Trump, of all people.

Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think. Despite recent gains by populist parties in Sweden and Italy, most countries in Europe still enjoy a strong degree of social consensus.

The big question mark remains, unfortunately, the United States. Some 30 to 35 percent of its voters continue to believe the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the Republican Party has been taken over by Donald Trump’s MAGA followers, who are doing their best to put election deniers in positions of power around the country. This group does not represent a majority of the country but is likely to regain control of at least the House of Representatives this November, and possibly the presidency in 2024.

Here's where I would raise my hand in the question period. "Mr Fukuyama, on one hand, you cite Hegel, who argues that the process of dialectics works of necessity to drive us to the absolute and unconditioned form of ethics/politics. Yet at the same time you see a need to struggle, as though this were a matter under question, and we in the US must struggle against Trump just as Ukraine struggles against Putin. But if there's an underlying narrative that the Whigs will prevail, why should we go to all this effort?"

And I could finally go back to sleep when I realized that Mr Fukuyama's answer would be, "Trust the Force, Luke!"

May the Force be with you all.

Francis Fukuyama Still Thinks History Is Over

In a piece at The Atlantic, More Proof That This Really Is the End of History, Francis Fukuyama doubles down:

The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy.

But why should there be only two alternatives, Hegel-Fukuyama and Marxism? When I first posted about Mr Fukuyama here, I suggested that Osama bin Laden needed to hear that message but clearly didn't. And although Marxism has reverted to the parlor and the faculty lounge where it had been before 1917, this hasn't cured the problem of big-state authoritarianism, something the Ukraine war highlights. Fukuyama more or less acknowledges this when he continues,

We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

The Russo-Ukraine War provides a distraction that lets him pull a sleight of hand. Marxism turns into Russia like a knife turns into a fork:

Putin’s bad decision making and shallow support has produced one of the biggest strategic blunders in living memory. Far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule, and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks.

But Russian military weakness is nothing new; it was illustrated in the Crimean War, the 1905 war with Japan, and again in 1914. Just because Russia didn't blunder in living memory doesn't mean it's never blundered, and if anything, it was more effective militarily under Marxism than under the alternatives.

My own thinking as it's developed here is that the process we're seeing is a reversion to the power structure in northeast Europe before the rise of the Russian state, a domination by Swedish-Nordic, Lithuanian, and Polish empires that will assert economic control over Belarus, Ukraine, and likely western Russia. But wait: doesn't this actually mean that history will continue, it isn't over?

And another, related question: will the EU expand into some sort of uber-liberal continental or even world democracy? And will that vindicate Hegel-Fukuyama? I have two reservations. One is that Brexit has already shown there are fissures in that consensus. The second is that even if it's claimed that the Russo-Finnish War has strengthened the EU, there are bothersome questions that will emerge once it's settled. For instance, the EU has adopted policies that not only discourage fossil fuels, but they now wish to discourage use of nitrate fertilizer, which has caused conflict with farmers in the Netherlands. How will President Zelensky react when Ukraine defeats Russia and joins the EU, only to find the EU seeking actively to reduce Ukraine's agricultural prosperity in the name of climate? How will this differ from Putin's aim to reduce Ukraine's prosperity in the name of Russia?

This brings us to the issue of whether there are alternate credible end states to an inevitable worldwide liberal democracy, which is Fukuyama's conclusion. (And isn't this just a variation on the old chestnut of the Whig Interpretation of history?) At this point, we might say there's a globalist consensus in favor of what I would call neo-Malthusianism. Classical Malthusianism is "the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off."

Neo-Malthusianism is an attempt to deal with the proven falsity of the premise that the growth of the food supply is linear -- development of fertilizer and pesticides, improved preservation and transportation, and modern cultivation have shown conclusively that this is not the case. Neo-Malthusianism is an attempt to revert to the notion that other resources besides the food supply are linear, except that to avoid a population die-off (i.e., the death of the planet), we now need to reduce either global population or global prosperity in an artificial and not fully specified but drastic way (at least, not specified explicitly right now).

And there are other conflicts that have yet to be resolved. We're witnessing the collapse of Protestantism. Will fallout from the Russo-Ukraine war lead to a schism within Orthodoxy that has an equivalent effect? What will it be? And whatever the outcome, isn't the study of such trends as they continue the legitimate province of historians? So beyond Mr Fukuyama's questionable argument that history is leading inevitably to worldwide liberal democracy, there's a whole separate question of what possible systems and their concomitant disasters we'll encounter on the way.

Heck, things are only just now starting to get interesting.

He's Been Doing It All Along

Just for fun, I did a google search this morning on "Biden sniffing hair" to see if anyone had anything intelligent to say about last weekend's episodes, and the messages above came up -- "It looks like the results below are changing quickly". This is actually the first I've ever seen this message on a search, which suggests more people than usual are looking it up -- but nobody has anything new to say about it. However, this tweet from last July suggests it's been going on steadily in the background and has never really stopped, despite the big guy's 2019 promise to abstain:

Dad ran into Joe on a biking trail in Delaware and got a live sniffing video lmfao pic.twitter.com/qz9KuEzN9E

— martman (@big__marty) July 10, 2022

This raises a question of etiquette if nothing else. A year ago, Brandon caused a minor stir when he put his hand on Prince William's shoulder during a visit to the UK. One does not touch the royals. Indeed, I assume there's a generally similar rule with the US Secret Service: the president may venture into a crowd and shake hands, but the overall conditions must certainly be circumscribed, and the agents must be carefully surveying all those nearby for any signs of hinky intent.

I've got to assume that if any member of the public approached the president intending to sniff his hair, he'd be taken down in an instant. This makes me wonder, in fact, what the precise circumstances were surrounding the famous public embrace between Bill and Monica -- would an ordinary member of the public be able to do that or anything like it? What did the secret secret service know?

And this brings up the question I had yesterday: who was the middle-aged woman in the jacket next to Brandon while he fondled and sniffed the girls at the table? Was she some sort of minder over and above the obvious Secret Service? Why did she seem initially to reach her hand out to restrain him and then think better of it, turning apparently to fuss with the fan instead? Might Brandon and the nation be better served if there were a permanent Easter Bunny designated to remain at his side and usher him away from nymphets?

Why are we even having to ask these questions? And why hasn't anyone said anything about this?

The Return Of Creepy Joe!

On April 3, 2019, Joe Biden said

he’s ready to respect people’s “personal space” after new attention came to allegations he had acted inappropriately with women.

“I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, ‘You can do this.’ Whether they are women, men, young, old, it’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the way I show I care about them, that I listen,” he said. “Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying, I understand it. And I’ll be much more mindful. That’s my responsibility and I’ll meet it.”

Biden offered no direct apology for his past actions but said he would be mindful of changing norms around physical contact.

But as of this weekend, he's back to being creepy with little girls. On Friday, in Irvine, CA, he'd returned to his old ways:

President Joe Biden grabs a young girl by the shoulder and tells her “no serious guys till your 30” as she looks back appearing uncomfortable, secret service appears to try to stop me from filming it after Biden spoke @ Irvine Valley Community College | @TPUSA @FrontlinesShow pic.twitter.com/BemRybWdBI

— Kalen D’Almeida (@fromkalen) October 15, 2022

Red State notes at the link:

If you watch the video, there are several things to note, and none of them are acceptable for any man to do, much less the President of the United States.

First, before Biden grabs the teenage girl’s shoulder, you can see Biden lean in to sniff her hair. He’s been caught many times doing that over the years and no viable explanation has ever been offered to explain his behavior. You’d think the news industry, which claims to care about stuff like this, would have some curiosity, but I guess not.

Secondly, after the sniff, he grabs her shoulder without her consent. It’s a really odd action that any normal, fully-sentient man would avoid. I would never lean in to grab a young girl (or any girl) I don’t personally know, even during a photo op. That’s not endearing, and it’s not just “ole Joe.” It’s creepy and highly concerning. You can tell by the way she tilts her head away as she turns around that she feels uncomfortable with his touching.

But it turns out this wasn't a one-time slip. Yesterday, at a Baskin-Robbins in Gresham, OR,

Biden attempts a sniffing at a Baskin Robbins in Oregon today pic.twitter.com/HeTcGxPLXj

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 16, 2022

While he was eating his ice cream Biden turned his focus on a girl who was sitting in the store and went over to shake her hand. It’s hard to tell what he said and he held her hand longer than is required to shake it. But it isn’t hard to see how fast the little girl pulled her hand away from him.

Biden also bent in, sniffing the head of the woman next to the little girl. He also appeared to kiss the top of her head.

I don't know what the role of the middle-aged woman in the jacket to Biden's right is in the vignette above, but she appears to be flustered and almost seems to move to restrain him but thinks better of it and fusses with something else instead. The secret service agent behind her seems just a trifle uncomfortable as well. The problem here is that somebody's campaign is going to use these images in a meme.

I imagine that many of us have put up with people in authority -- parents, bosses, teachers -- who repeatedly overstep boundaries and decorum, through inappropriate touching, comments, or whatever else, who've had the problem explained to them over and over again in no uncertain terms, but keep doing it. Pretty clearly that's what's going on here. I don't think this reflects any medical issue, it's a question of implulse control and entitlement, and it's apparently something he's been doing all his life, or at least ever since he realized he could get away with it.

And there's no question that before he announced his presidential campaign, back in 2019, somebody read him the riot act about the touching and hair sniffing, but it hasn't made any difference. In fact, I wonder if someone said something to him after the Irvine episode on Friday, but he went ahead and did it again in Gresham the next day just to prove a point.

The lizard people need to get on this. If he won't listen, he needs to be told what his decision about 2024 is to be. .

Kerch Bridge Update

In the week following the explosion or explosions on the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea with European Russia, there have been lots of questions and few solid answers. Initial analysis of the damage, even from informed engineers, was sanguine. For instance, as of this past Monday,

Observers have been left wondering: what was the effect of the blast and fire on the surviving bridge elements, what repairs could be required, and when is it safe to re-open a bridge after such an event?

As experts in bridge safety and blast engineering, we have (some) answers.

. . . In structural engineering, safety is not an either-or proposition. It is measured on a continuum known as the probability of failure, or more positively, the reliability index of a structure. . . . for key bridges such as the Crimean Bridge, it may be reasonable to accept a reduced level of safety when the costs associated with a disruption are very high.

Cranes have been shown lifting the fuel tanker wagon wreckage off the Crimea-bound rail line. It remains to be seen how the steel girders will perform under train travel. It is likely the trains will be instructed to go slow to reduce vibratory effects, and that wagons will not be fully-loaded.

Under normal circumstances, the blast and damage we have seen would result in an extended closure and repair works. Clearly, however, the circumstances are far from normal.

Official Russian statements as of Monday were also sanguine but vague:

A pillar and a part of the rail track of the Crimean Bridge, which was damaged on Saturday in a terrorist attack, will need to be repaired, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said on Monday. Speaking at a meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Khusnullin offered reassurances that the damage did not pose any safety risks to vehicles.

“As a result of the diagnostics, the need to eliminate damage to the expansion joint on one of the pillars was established. The preliminary deadline for repairing the damage to the pillar is the end of this week,” Khusnullin said.

. . . Metal structures for the repairs will begin being delivered by the end of the week from the cities of Tyumen, Kurgan, and Voronezh, the deputy prime minister said, expressing gratitude to everyone involved for their “prompt work.”

As for the railway portion of the bridge, Khusnullin said that a preliminary assessment of the tracks had shown that two spans needed to be replaced.“The repairs do not affect the delivery of goods and passengers,” he emphasized.

The head of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, has estimated that fully restoring the bridge could take about two months.

It was thought that the rail bridge that runs parallel to the highway bridge suffered the least damage, since it was farther from the blast, although the effect on the steel of the heat from the burning tank cars loaded with fuel was hard to calculate. The rail bridge has two tracks, with the track farthest from the blast thought to be able to carry trains at reduced speed and loads, as outlined in the first link above. An initial video showed a test train operating on this track, but as of Tuesday, there were no additional trains:

Day 4 and still no train runs on the Kerch Bridge. No (military) supplies for Kherson and Zaporizhzhia since 4 days, at least not in large quantities. Remember, war of logistics and every day counts. #Kerch #Crimea #Ukraine

— (((Tendar))) (@Tendar) October 11, 2022

Repair of the highway bridge is likely to be complicated by damage to one of the piers, visible in the photo at right. This means that restoring this section of the bridge will require more than just replacing individual spans; likely this pier will also need to be replaced, a much bigger job. The official Russian version was updated later in the week, and it appears to reflect the damage to the highway pier:

On Oct. 13, the Russian cabinet issued a decree identifying Irkutsk-based construction firm Nizhneangarsktransstroy as handling the repairs and ordering all work on the bridge to be complete by July 1, 2023. According to Khusnullin, the main work repairing the bridge expected to be completed by the end of the year.

"Technologies have been found to dismantle the existing destroyed bridge supports,” Khusnullin told the news agency. “I can say that the first supports of the new bridge have already been manufactured at factories and are going to the Crimean bridge.”

Howwever, this time line is considerably longer than the two month estimate for fully restoring the bridge that was given on Monday. There's no specific reference to the status of the rail spans, but the few discussions available on the web suggest that both tracks on the railroad bridge are supported by a single set of steel box girder spans, which means that the fuel fire would have damaged one or more spans supporting both tracks, which means the rail bridge will not be usable for some months.

The problem, of course, is that Ukraine has resumed a southern offensive in Kherson as of this morning, and Russian forces west of the Dnieper are already isolated from supply and reinforcement due to loss of bridges over that river. For now, it looks as though Russia won't be able to supply its forces elsewhere in Kherson or Crimea for a period of some months just as Ukraine begins a serious offensive in that area.

PayPal Bank Run!

The fallout from the PayPal "glitch", whereby they announced they would debit customer accounts up to $2500 directly for publishing "misinformation", continues.

Do not take their $15 bribe. Delete your PayPal account. https://t.co/lFd7QBxG7M

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 13, 2022

Despite this, however, it sounds as though PayPal has been experiencing an effective bank run:

Following the trend to boycott PayPal, some users were having a problem closing their accounts.

One user commented, “Endless hours chatting with the support here. Some people are able to close it in seconds. Others it takes weeks. Criminal.”

Another said, “Looks like they’ve disabled Account Closure over at Paypal to prevent customers exiting their platform. No doubt there’ll be the usual corporate-speak on “temporary technical issue” inbound.”

Well, consumers aren't stupid. When I began to research this issue, I discovered information that was already in the public domain: PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy was a risk to businesses long before they mooted the "misinformation" clause:

As a business owner, you want to make it easy and convenient for customers to pay with their method of choice. That’s why it’s so important to find a reliable payments partner that allows you to securely accept credit and debit card payments.

However, not all payment processors are created equal. Some of the biggest names in payments are notorious for their poor treatment of merchants. From Stripe’s restrictive list of prohibited businesses to PayPal’s extreme fines and bans, there are plenty of reasons to steer clear of these payment processing giants.

In fact, running your business through PayPal could cost you everything. Whether you’ve heard the PayPal horror stories or have been a victim yourself, this article will help you protect your business from any further catastrophe.

. . . PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy is notoriously vague. This allows them to shut down your account or freeze your funds at their own discretion. PayPal can fine your merchant account somewhat arbitrarily, including charging $2500 per violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.

Well before the "misinformation" kerfuffle, the Acceptable Use Policy already listed "the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory" as activities that could result in $2500 fines or cancellation of an account. The link continues,

. . . Not only is $2500 a significant fine for small businesses, but there’s also no clear list of violations that result in the fine. So, many business owners are operating somewhat blindly, hoping that they aren’t breaking any of PayPal’s ill-defined rules.

Perhaps the biggest problem with PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy is that it’s open to interpretation. PayPal uses vague language to define “acceptable use” so they can freeze or charge your business account at their own discretion.

. . . Furthermore, if PayPal decides to ban your account altogether for violating the Acceptable Use Policy, they can hold the funds in your account hostage for up to 180 days. That’s almost six months during which not only is your account closed down, forcing you to look for alternative methods for customers to pay you, but your cash is tied up for no good reason. Unfortunately, that’s often enough to cripple a business and force you to close up shop.

. . . To make matters worse, there is no defined appeals process. They can ban you without warning, potentially without allowing you to cash out your account balance for six months. Plus, they can fine you multiple times to deplete your balance—and there’s not much you can do to stop them.

At minimum, the site's recommendations include withdrawing funds from PayPal as soon as possible after payments are deposited and beyond that, for a business, moving to a more reliable payment processor. The "misinformation" issue is only the most recent and most visible risk associated with its product.

At this point, though, the misinformation flap is starting to metastasize into a textbook corporate crisis for PayPal:

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is demanding PayPal provide answers about new language added and then removed from its user agreement — asking specifically if the payment processing giant consulted with the Biden administration on the policy.

PayPal this week announced that it would deduct $2,500 from users who violate its policy on “misinformation,” “hate,” or speech the company deemed “unfit for publication,” but then quickly pivoted to reverse the move following backlash.

, , , Issa asks PayPal how they intend to “adjudicate the ambiguous term ‘misinformation’,” asking specifically if COVID misinformation would be included, as well as gender pronouns.

. . . Former top management at PayPal, including Elon Musk, David Sacks, and David Marcus, spoke out on social media against the announcement.

Markus called the policy “Insanity,” to which Musk replied “Agreed.”

David Sacks warned, “Get your money out of paypal right now.”

I use PayPal primarily to order through eBay, which has much better prices on many items than Amazon. As such, I'm using it exclusively as a payment processor. In the past, as a freelance writer, I sometimes got payments through PayPal, and I withdrew those balances immediately to my normal checking account. As such, for now, I don't intend to make any changes. But clearly the "misinformation" issue has alerted consumers, and especially online small businesses, to the risks of dealing with PayPal, and this in turn could threaten PayPal's ability to continue as a viable operation.

Where's the crisis management team? Typical advice would include:

[I]n the age of social media, the truth – or a version of it – will always come out. If you don’t tell the truth, and get found out (and you will), it will be far more damaging than getting the issue out in the open, on your own terms. Never, ever lie. . . . If you don’t communicate, someone else will – and they may not have your best interests at heart. . . . Put right what’s gone wrong, and tell people (or even better, show them) what you’re doing to make things right.

Rep Issa's letter, quoted in the link above, asks PayPal to

detail the offices and/or departments within PayPal that approved of the updated Acceptable Use Policy language that was posted on the company’s website, with a planned implementation date of November 3, 2022. . . . What categories of “misinformation” did PayPal contemplate needed censorship that were not already covered by the previous policy?

These questions are inevitably starting to emerge, and PayPal is going to need to come up with answers. I suspect this case will wind up in future PR textbooks.