Wait A Moment: Aren't We Already Committed To World War III? What Will It Cost?

I've kept returning to Anne Applebaum's Atlantic piece that I linked Tuesday, The Russian Empire Must Die. Let's keep in mind that this wasn't written by a raving right-winger; it was published in almost the most prestigious of establishment outlets (I don't know if she shopped it to Foreign Affairs) and written by a fully formed, fully vetted member of the liberal Democrat establishment with credentials comparable to, say, Secretary Blinken, who is currently following policies with goals that, while not as clearly expressed, are at least congruent with those Ms Applebaum outlines in her essay.

Her argument is clear:

Ideas move across time and space, sometimes in unexpected ways. The notion that a country should be different—differently ruled, differently organized—can come from old books, from foreign travel, or just from its citizens’ imaginations. At the height of the Russian empire, in the 19th century, under the rule of some of the most ponderous autocrats of their time, a plethora of reform movements flowered: social democrats, peasant reformers, advocates of constitutions and parliaments.

. . . Most suffered from one major blind spot: Neither then nor later did most Russian liberals understand that the imperial project itself was the source of Russian autocracy. The White Russian armies lost to the Bolsheviks in part because they would not join forces in 1918–20 with newly independent Poland or would-be independent Ukraine. Democratic ideas did not triumph in either the branch or the trunk in the years that followed the Russian Revolution, partly because the state needed to use so much violence to keep Ukraine, Georgia, and the other republics inside the Soviet Union.

Still, even the decades of fear and poverty that followed the Russian Revolution did not eliminate the belief that another kind of state was possible.

. . . They lost, of course, to yet another dictator who is using an imperial war to eliminate his enemies and spread fear across Russia.

. . . Russian liberals have failed before. They failed in the 1900s, they failed in the 2000s, and they are failing now. They failed to stop Putin, failed to prevent this catastrophe from unfolding. Some of them failed, at least until recently, to understand how Russian imperialism has fed and nurtured Russian autocracy[.]

I quoted her overall conclusion on Tuesday:

I have argued before that there is no guarantee that American democracy can survive, that what happens to America tomorrow depends on the actions of Americans today. But the same is true of Russia. The country’s future will be shaped not by mystical laws of history but by how its leaders and citizens absorb and interpret the tragedy of this shocking, brutal, unnecessary war. The best way that outsiders can help Russia change is to ensure that Ukraine takes back Ukrainian territory and defeats the empire.

Her argument, as far as we can parse it out, is that Russia is a problem. It has been a problem at least since the 19th century. The problem can be traced to its imperialism. Russian liberals, however well-intended, have failed repeatedly to solve the Russian problem. Outsiders must help Russia change, since Russians themselves have failed. Thus we must aid Ukraine in this project, although the overall project is greater than Ukraine, it's ending the imperialism that feeds Russian autocracy.

I'm not completely comfortable with this; it seems to be at least a first cousin of sloganeering about the war to end wars, or the war to make the world safe for democracy, with its scope somewhat reduced to making it the war to end Russia as we know it. But slogans have never been the real cause of anything. Nevertheless, even if Russia is a problem that needs urgent fixing, the US otherwise guaranteed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, under which the borders of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were to be guaranteed in return for those countries surrendering their former Soviet nuclear weapons. In addition, there can be no question that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the UN Charter, which the US has frequently used to justify its own policy goals.

But if those were the sole issues, we wouldn't have a bigger problem, which is that even leaving nuclear armageddon aside, solving Ukraine alone will still be like pulling the fatal thread. Secretaries Austin and Blinken expressed US objectives in the Ukraine war on April 25:

At a press conference in Poland after a surprise visit to Kyiv, Lloyd Austin was asked if he would now define US goals differently from those set out soon after the Russian invasion. In response, he started out with the established administration line about helping Ukraine retain its sovereignty and defend its territory.

Then Austin added a second goal: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” That meant Russia should “not have the capability to very quickly reproduce” the forces and equipment that had been lost in Ukraine.

. . . The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who travelled with Austin to see Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv, agreed with his formulation of US objectives, saying: “I think the secretary said it very well”.

I've been saying here for quite some time that Austin and Blinken appear to have been able to establish Ukraine policy as a completely separate carveout within the administration, with Biden's role closely circumscribed to the extent that he and his immediate staff aren't allowed to deviate from carefully crafted, minimalist expressions dictated to them by State and Defense. This has worked up to now.

However, as the Guardian link above points out, the view of the mission within the State-Defense carveout has expanded from the simple obligation of restoring Ukraine's borders under the Budapest Assurances to the larger objective of weakening Russia militarily to the degree that an invasion of Ukraine (or by implication any other former Soviet state) can't be repeated. And this isn't so far from Ms Applebaum's goal of solving the Russia problem by dissolving its empire.

This is going to be expensive, and why shouldn't it be? I've been posting fanciful maps here now and then of people's ideas about what a post-imperial Russia might look like; another one is at the top of today's entry. The implication of all these projected scenarios, if it's never expressed directly, is this is what Russia would look like after a Tom Clancy fantasy of World War III. And if you play around with this kind of fantasy, this is precisely what you're going to get, a Treaty of Delhi, say, that codifes agreements made by the allied powers in the Auckland Conference, which results in a map like the one above.

If you're going to fix Russia, you're talking about something at the level of World Wars I and II, followed by something comparable to the Congress of Vienna. The current US strategy of nickel-and-diming a few dozen billions in aid to Ukraine every few weeks isn't going to cover that kind of cost, even if US military forces are never directly involved.

Right now, there seem to be two separate factions in the establishment, whether either recognizes it or not: there's the Blinken-Austin-Applebaum faction that thinks fixing Russia is a priority, while there's the Pelosi-Harris faction that places priority on climate change, pansexualism, and the alliance with the Lumpenproletariat. If we're going to have World War III, we simply can't pay for both. My guess is that neither faction thinks it can rely on Biden to make an effective decision, and that's where things will stand for the foreseeable future -- except that circumstances are inevitably going to force a choice.

Space Aliens Are Neo-Malthusians!

Yahoo links, somewhat misleadingly, a strange paper in which the authors argue that Malthusianism governs the destiny of life in the universe.

NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.

Curious, I went to the paper itself. The lead author, Jonathan H Jiang, is a "principal scientist" (whatever that means) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with degrees including a PhD in fields related to astrophysics. This is a field that, like linguistics, seems to be dominated by wild speculation, so that's red flag number one. Number two is that, although he's the lead author, his co-authors include Philip E. Rosen, who is listed as an "independent researcher" in Vancouver, WA but is elsewhere listed as "retired"; Kelly Lu, a member of the class of 2024 at Santa Margarita Catholic High School; Kristen A. Fahy, a member of the Tropospheric Composition Group in the Earth Science Section at JPL, who holds an MEd in Physics Education; and Piotr Obacz, a lecturer in the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He holds a PhD, but apparently not in astrophysics or a related field.

I don't know if his co-authors qualify as a group red flag, or if each one qualifies as a red flag individually. The paper is located at a site called arXiv.com, and it doesn't appear to have been vetted by any peer-reviewed journal. Mr Rosen and Ms Fahy frequently appear with Dr Jiang as co-authors on numerous papers related to extraterrestial life. Mr Jiang and Ms Fahy appear together on the YouTube video A Beacon in the Galaxy to Message ET: Are We In The Dark Forest?

The best we can conclude is that two of the authors are employed at JPL, but I don't think we can assume that it's endorsed by either JPL or NASA, and it isn't peer reviewed. However, it proposes an intriguing solution to Fermi's Paradox, as the paper puts it,

Even as ambitious programs such as SETI aim to solve the technological challenges, the results have so far turned up empty for any signs of life in the galaxy. We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society advances exponentially toward space exploration, acting as the Great Filter: a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other, which explains the cosmic silence.

Note the presence of "exponential" in the premise, which is a key component of Malthusian theory, that populations expand exponentially while resources grow only linearly. The piece goes on to argue that the Great Filter may be several things, like pandemics or nuclear war, but it certainly includes climate change. Maybe, that is, all civilizations throughout the universe grow exponentially until they exhaust linear resources, if they don't blow themselves up in the meantime. You'd think they'd be on the verge of Jiang's Law, an equation showing the inevitable rate at which those things predictably happen, but of course they're nowhere close.

Returning to the Drake Equation, recent modeling suggests that it is the lifespan of civilizations capable of interstellar comminication, "L", which is the most influential among its seven variables. Taking this claim as stipulation, it follows immediately that the sub-factors comprising "L" must be identified and studied in detail if we are to maximize humanity's lifespan.

Parsing this out, of course, we have no idea what the value of "L" is, since we haven't located a single civilization capable of interstellar communication, much less determined how long it took to get that way. However, if we stipulate that "L" has a value, we need to study what that value is in order to maximize humanity's lifespan. But isn't this a non sequitur? We have an unknown variable, but we'll postulate it's knowable, and we'll arbitrarily agree that it has everything to do with humanity's lifespan. But if, as the authors agree, we haven't even seen a civilization (including ours) that's capable of interstellar communication, how can we know anything about it? Where have you been, H G Wells?

Nevertheless, the authors conclude that nuclear disaster and climate change must be avoided if we're to communicate with aliens, even though Jiang's Law so far asserts that the other alien civilizations have already destroyed themselves. So, er, if there's nobody to communicate with anyhow, why bother?

Doesn't matter. We have to shrink our carbon footprint so we can do this.

There are lots of things we can conclude here, but the first one is that the workers at JPL must live lives in many ways comparable to those who've worked, up to now, at Twitter. They've spent countless hours generating this gobbledygook on taxpayer money. Whether they get free breakfast, free wine, and yoga rooms remains to be seen.

One disturbing sign, though, is that both Yahoo and Hot Air took this piece of fluff seriously.

So, Are We All Neoconservatives Now?

I keep thinking about George Kennan's 1946 Long Telegram, which formed the basis for the consensus US Soviet policy up to the Reagan administration. One of his major conclusions in the telegram, though, is questionable in long term perspective, although it was justifiable in 1946 with Stalin still in power. At best, it was long delayed and not the result of individual transfer of power:

Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme [test] of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin's death was first such transfer, and its effect wracked Soviet state for 15 years[. . . .] Stalin's death or retirement will be second. But even this will not be final test. Soviet internal system will now be subjected, by virtue of recent territorial expansions, to series of additional strains which once proved severe tax on Tsardom.

Kennan wasn't an advocate of NATO. This article in The Hill outlines his opposition to much of Western Cold War strategy:

Writing in 1997 at age 92, he declared that expanding NATO to the east “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

“Such a decision,” he went on, “may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations.”

Were he with us today, Kennan would undoubtedly say “I told you so.”

However, the Hill piece at the link is dated January 28, 2022, a full month before Putin's invasion and the recognition within a matter of days that Kennan's appraisals in fact weren't prescient. Stalin's death was handled with ruthless efficiency, while Khrushchev was even allowed a peaceful retirement. His successors died in their beds without provoking civil war, which was the consequence Kennan implicitly expected. Beyond that, while the Ukraine crisis is the result of the internal strains Kennan recognized, it didn't emerge with a Russian leadership transition. Instead, it came in the course of a long-term weakening of the Soviet system's successor state, over which Putin and his allies presided for decades.

Now let's look at someone wno might be regarded as Kennan's successor in formulating Western post-Soviet policy, Anne Applebaum. I'd read some of her books, and I was generally familiar with her public profile, but I never looked carefully at her bio until just now. According to the Wikipedia link,

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. . . . She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School (1982). Applebaum earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in history and literature from Yale University, where she attended the Soviet history course taught by Wolfgang Leonhard in fall 1982.

There you have a set of major data points. Trust me, I went to high school in Bethesda. If she went to Sidwell Friends and then Yale, she was connected. I suspect those connections, even more than her Yale degree, would have influenced her subsequent path. Take the analogy of the speedometer: it may say you're driving at 110 mph, but that's just an indication you have a fast car. Sidwell Friends and Yale are just the number; the connections are the car:

As a student, Applebaum spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), which, she has written, helped to shape her opinions. She was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987). She studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.

Applebaum is a member of the elite; I've got to assume that, like her contemporary Antony Blinken, she was born into it, but Wikipedia makes no mention of how. The link does say of her career, though:

Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct regarding the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In an article in The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", noting that the actions of President Vladimir Putin had violated "a series of international treaties". On March 7, in another article on The Daily Telegraph, discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies". At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.

. . . She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". In July 2016, before the US election, she was one of the first American journalists to write about the significance of Russia's ties to Donald Trump and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic that "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America."

I don't buy the view that Trump was, or is, Putin's puppet, and I think the right-wing intellectuals who admire Putin are at the Rod Dreher level. Nevertheless, It seems to me that Applebaum, if she doesn't specifically endorse neoconservatism, is clearly aligned with it -- as indeed are Secretaries Blinken and Austin. In fact, neoconservatism in foreign and military policy is hard to define. According to Wikipedia,

The term "neoconservative" was the subject of increased media coverage during the presidency of George W. Bush, with particular emphasis on a perceived neoconservative influence on American foreign policy, as part of the Bush Doctrine.

. . . The Bush Doctrine was greeted with accolades by many neoconservatives. When asked whether he agreed with the Bush Doctrine, Max Boot said he did and that "I think [Bush is] exactly right to say we can't sit back and wait for the next terrorist strike on Manhattan. We have to go out and stop the terrorists overseas. We have to play the role of the global policeman. ... But I also argue that we ought to go further". Discussing the significance of the Bush Doctrine, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol claimed: "The world is a mess. And, I think, it's very much to Bush's credit that he's gotten serious about dealing with it. ... The danger is not that we're going to do too much. The danger is that we're going to do too little".

It's worth noting that one inflection point in the 2008 election was Obama's insistence that by ending the Iraq war, which had been the creature of Bush's neoconservative advisers, the US would achieve a "peace dividend" that would allow funding universal medical care. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was effectively a disagreement over how that "peace dividend" would be distributed, not for the resumption of Bush Doctrine interventionism and as Wikipedia puts it,

Several neoconservatives played a major role in the Stop Trump movement in 2016, in opposition to the Republican presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, due to his criticism of interventionist foreign policies, as well as their perception of him as an "authoritarian" figure.

It seems to me that what we're looking at right now is a recalibration of the center, driven by the perceived exigencies of the Russo-Ukraine War, and a return to an even more muscular interventionism than Bush's. Anne Applebaum's most recent Atlantic piece is The Russian Empire Must Die:

I have argued before that there is no guarantee that American democracy can survive, that what happens to America tomorrow depends on the actions of Americans today. But the same is true of Russia. The country’s future will be shaped not by mystical laws of history but by how its leaders and citizens absorb and interpret the tragedy of this shocking, brutal, unnecessary war. The best way that outsiders can help Russia change is to ensure that Ukraine takes back Ukrainian territory and defeats the empire.

In other words, Applebaum is advocating an essentially neoconservative policy of proactive interventionism on behalf of Ukraine, but with the clear implication that Ukrainian independence is just one step toward the dissolution of the Russian empire -- and clearly Applebaum, with both Polish and US citizenship, sees Poland playing a major role in northeastern Europe in its wake.

This in turn was brought about by the complete surprise of Ukraine's performance in the first weeks after Putin's invasion. When I look at the Banksy mural in Ukraine at the top of this post, I think the figure of the big attacker being brought down by the smaller, childlike figure, applies to more than just Russia and Putin -- Zelensky has performed the same sort of martial arts move on Western received opinion, and he's done it in a matter of months.

The issue isn't whether Putin tried to affect the US midterms -- if he did, for instance, by delaying the evacuation of Kherson until the following day -- this was feckless and clumsy. Zelensky had already sent a much more powerful message. In fact, I believe he's handed the Democrats a strategy to move the political center, if they're smart enough to take it.

They do have to do something about Biden, but we'll have to see how this all shakes out.

The Return Of Trump Dubya

The least-noticed development of the midterm elections' aftermath is this one:

Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia https://t.co/aI0uXJt4sX

— CNN International (@cnni) November 11, 2022

CNN continues at greater length in a story:

The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

This will be the first public discussion between Zelensky – whose participation will be virtual – and the former president, following a private meeting they had earlier this year. After that initial meeting Bush called Zelensky the “Winston Churchill of our time.”

Both Dubya and his father have scrupulously followed the traditional protocol whereby former presidents maintain a low profile and don't normally engage in political dialogue after leaving office. Here, Dubya is pushing that adherence to the limit by very visibly endorsing a particular foreign policy that's been controversial at home. On one hand, I find this reassuring; at least in comparison to both Trump and Biden, Dubya, for all his faults, is much closer to a functional adult at this stage.

But let's see if we can peek behind the scenes at what this really means. Although Dubya is as close as we have to an adult, he isn't eligible to be reelected to the presidency and probably isn't interested in any other office. He's standing in for someone or something else. On the other hand, his chief proxy, Liz Cheney, daughter of his vice president, is a lame duck at the end of her own political career. For whom is he acting, then?

The answer is fairly clear, he's acting on behalf of Volodymyr Zelensky, the only consequential leader now on the world stage. Biden is on a whirlwind tour of climate conferences, the US election is uncertain with no clear Republican leadership, the UK conservatives are in a muddle, the Putin state is in crisis, and every other European leader has been upstaged by Zelensky, who de facto controls NATO and EU policy without being a member of either.

Let's consider as well the effect Zelensky has had on the US political environment. In summer 2021, Biden singlehandedly ordered the Kabul debacle. Had the Russian invasion of Ukraine not developed the way it did, the 2022 midterms might have been very different. By not fleeing Kyiv in a US C130 as Biden offered, Zelensky saved him from another disaster and created not just a distraction but a whole new issue that quietly saved the congressional Democrats. They were aligned with Winston Churchill; the Republicans wanted to appease Hitler. Joe Kemp apparently lost his House race in WA-03 over just this question.

Dubya is copacetic with this. Not only that, but we may be sure this public conversation with Zelensky has the tacit approval of Secretary Blinken, if Blinken himself wasn't the instigator. But wait a moment -- Dubya's foreign and defense policies were neoconservative, and neoconservatives have been out of favor since public frustration with the Second Gulf War helped defeat Republicans in 2008. The Obama policy, which had been the default for Biden as well, was to draw down from Iraq and Afghanistan, de-emphasize Israel, and build up Iran as the regional power broker. How's that working out?

At the same time, Trump, who has made few specific comments on the Ukraine war other than to say it wouldn't have happened if he'd been president, had a policy of treating Russia as a near peer of the US, granting it autonomy over a sphere of interest that included Ukraine provided it didn't rock the boat. The problem for Trump is that this policy has been overtaken by events; Russia did rock the boat big time. The best estimate we can make is that Biden's Kabul debacle led Putin to miscalculate and believe Biden, a weaker figure than Trump, would not react to a renewed invasion and annexation of Ukraine.

The miscalculation left Zelensky out of the equation, but neither did Putin figure in his own military incompetence. The political consequences for Russia are yet to be determined, but the political consequences for the US are beginning to emerge, especially a return of neoconservative foreign and military policy. This has most visibly taken the form of the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, led by the prominent neoconservative Frederick Kagan, becoming the chief articulator of US Ukraine strategy, unabashedly pro-Zelensky. Zelensky is an authentic figure, as Dubya says someone at the Winston Churchill level, whom I don't think either Biden or Trump can easily relate to or appreciate. But as of yesterday, the ISW clearly expresses what has been, and according to Dubya will continue to be, US policy:

Ukraine has by no means liberated the minimum territory essential to its future security and economic survival even with the victory in western Kherson, finally. The city of Melitopol and surrounding areas, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, land on the east bank of the lower Dnipro River, and territory in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are all vital terrain for Ukraine, as ISW has previously argued.

. . . Ukrainians and the West must bend every effort toward enabling the liberation of those lands as rapidly as possible before worrying about what lies beyond them. Momentum is an important factor in war. Ukraine has it now. Kyiv and its partners must make the most of it.

Dubya is back. The neoconservatives have in fact been back since February. At this point, I think both Biden and Trump are irrelevant, but we don't know what else will come, except that the real leader of the free world has turned out to be the former actor and comic Zelensky.

The King Of The Rains

The Institute for the Study of War, normally a snoozer on my list of sites to visit, gave me a surprising flash of insight in last night's summation of the Ukraine war:

A pro-war Russian ideologist, Alexander Dugin, openly criticized Putin — whom he referred to as the autocrat — for failing to uphold Russian ideology by surrendering Kherson City on November 12. Dugin said this Russian ideology defines Russia’s responsibility to defend “Russian cities” such as Kherson, Belgorod, Kursk, Donetsk, and Simferopol. Dugin noted that an autocrat has a responsibility to save his nation all by himself or face the fate of “king of the rains,” a reference to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough in which a king was killed because he was unable to deliver rain amidst a drought.

I hadn't thought of Frazer in decades. I ran into him in graduate school, a 19th century bourgeois optimist along the line of Hegel, Darwin, or Carlyle, a distinctly minor figure, but the trope was so intriguing that I followed it up. From The Golden Bough p 107:

The priesthood of the Alfai, as he is called by the Barea and Kunama, is a remarkable one; he is believed to be able to make rain. . . . The people bring him tribute in the form of clothes and fruits, and cultivate for him a large field of his own.. . . He is supposed to conjure down rain and to drive away the locusts. But if he disappoints the people’s expectation and a great drought arises in the land, the Alfai is stoned to death, and his nearest relations are obliged to cast the first stone at him.

For now, this may apply to Putin, but I haven't been thinking about Putin lately; I've been thinking about Tuesday's election. There's a sense that Trump is behind the results, but as I've pointed out, his endorsements performed, if anything, slightly better than in previous years. Few other analyses have been illuminating, but the best one I found I haven't been able to find again. That writer made the point that Trump's first three years, as well as his 2015-16 campaign, were good. His final year, 2020, was a disaster.

He'd previously made monkeys of figures ranging from Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton, but by 2020, Dr Fauci managed to make a monkey of Trump. I thought this was a productive insight, but I didn't fully grasp it until I looked at the king of the rains. The electorate would tolerate Trump's abrasiveness as long as they could sense it brought results, but after all, the buck stops at the president's desk. He was in fact the king of the rains, and COVID was definitely drought and locusts together, especially for the working class.

Masks and social distance, after all, were annoyances, and for at least some in the gentry they were even public displays of assent. But everyone could put up with a mask if they needed to go out. The problem was for the millions who were locked out of jobs or had their children locked out of schools. That was more than an annoyance.

So let's look at the few clear winners from Tuesday: Selfish DeSantis Takes Entire Red Wave For Himself:

Donald Trump has appeared unphased by his young rival's selfish stockpiling of precious red wave, an act that purportedly made the 45th president's handpicked MAGA candidates look like incompetent morons, costing the party vital seats in the House and Senate. To demonstrate how unfettered he was by DeSantis, Trump went to TRUTH Social and Truthed, "Little Ronnie DeSelfish won't know what hit him when I very soon will reveal a redder, wavier wave, bigger than any wave that's ever waved. Huge wave. Huge, red wave!"

The few other surfers on the red wave were all governors who won landslides after taking highly visible positions against lockdowns, school and business closures, and mandatory vaccinations, Brian Kemp, Greg Abbott,and Kristi Noem. Kemp and Abbott In fact, are currently thought to have ended the careers of prominent opponents Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke in much the same way that Trump ended the careers of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in 2016. There have been almost no other bright spots for Republicans in the aftermath of the election.

In fact, an indication of Trump's tone deafness after 2020 was his continuing claim, correct as far as it went, to have fostered the development of COVID vaccines under "Operation Warp Speed" -- fine, but the vaccines didn't work and became the cause of much annoyance themselves, especially among working class and military voters, where they worked in combination to prolong other failed policies like school restrictions and lockdowns.

Thus I think I was correct in saying before the election that its big subtext was going to be COVID -- I just didn't quite grasp the spin this would take. Trump in 2020 was the king of the rains. If that was what he claimed to be, he should have driven away the locusts and the drought, especially for the poorest, and he didn't. Nor, of course, did any other prominent Washington Republicans, including McCarthy and McConnell. I would look to this as a key motivator for what's to come.

The Red Wave And Shorting Musk

One of my favorite films of all time is The Big Short. My sixth sense tells me it's time to short Elon Musk, and at the end of yesterday's post, I began to muse on how his kids (who apparently owe him very little) might lock in their inheritance in the event he dies a pauper. Of those, one died in infancy, and another, Vivian, changed their name based on "gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form." This would make Vivian an unlikely candidate for the strategy I have in mind.

But if the others can get their act together, they need to approach Dad in a body and propose jointly that each has a reasonable expectation of $xx,xxx,xxx inheritance at the time of Dad's demise. (Among other things, they would need to engage serious financial analysts as well as estate attorneys in determining this amount.) However, given Dad's recent record, there appears to be a significant chance that instead of leaving a massive estate, he will die a pauper. Thus they have an interest in locking in shares of the current value of his estate.

I wish my late father-in-law, an insurance CEO, were still around to advise me on this -- but even before he left us, he announced that now that he was retired, he had no intention of ever discussing insurance again. So that option's out. Nevertheless, my wife and I both worked for insurance companies, so we have some background in how this might be done.

In brief, assuming the remaining eight children can agree, what they need to do is persuade Dad to buy eight separate single-payment annuities that would pay each the specified $xx,xxx,xxx on Dad's death. The purchase price of each annuity would be actuarially determined by the age of each child at the time of purchase, as well as the insurer's calculation of Dad's likely lifespan and its ability to turn the purchase payment into the final amount, plus profit and the cost of administration. That's my idea of how the kids can short their father, which it sounds as though they'd be inclined to do.

This eliminates the risk that Elon dies a pauper and ensures that their inheritance is paid by an insurance company, not the estate. Remember that effectively, the guy just went long on Twitter, and the Twitter board quite early in the game realized Elon had handed them an unbelievable deal on the basis that he thought it was potentially a going concern. Darn right they sued to make him go through with it!

I'm a little bit surprised that nobody has recognized this. After two weeks of chaos at Twitter, there are still people who think Elon will change the whole world by eliminating blue check marks or something. Just this morning, Glenn Reynolds, who's supposed to be a smart guy, posted:

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Elon Musk is not a national security threat — TikTok is: Joe Biden is focusing on the wrong social media giant.

But Tik Tok isn’t a threat to the Democrats, and Elon Musk is.

Elon Musk is a clown. Remarkably few people in the public forum are coming to this realization -- far more are now discounting Donald Trump. An exception is Alex Berenson, a COVID and vaccine skeptic whose views are being vindicated on a daily basis. I think he has the right call on Musk as well:

[I]n January 2021, Musk and I were chatting (over Twitter, inevitably) about the worsening threat to free speech. Twitter had just banned Donald Trump.

. . . “Buy Twitter and put it in a blind trust,” I suggested. “Or make it a public benefit corporation committed to free speech first.”

“Not feasible,” Musk replied. He had other priorities - notably importing human consciousness into robots and putting humans on Mars. Plus he had two huge companies, Tesla and SpaceX, to run - and what might be called an active social life to boot.

. . . But at some point in late 2021 or early 2022, Musk must have realized buying Twitter would give him chance to reach entirely new heights of societal influence. Let other billionaires have their own football teams or superyachts or private islands.

Musk would have his own social media company, used by hundreds of millions of people every day. He would put himself, in the words of Tour de France, “hors categorie” -beyond categorization.

Buying Twitter would also give Musk a good excuse to sell tens of billions of dollars in Tesla stock at extraordinary prices.

Berenson then argues, obliquely, that Musk's 10-year Tesla options were about to expire, but absent any other reason to exercise them, it could be taken as evidence that he was going to cash out of Tesla as the stock peaked. In effect, he needed an excuse to sell Tesla stock without appearing to short himself as an insider. So along came Twitter and the chance to sell Tesla to buy Twitter. But right now, this deal is looking like a loser. He bought Twitter to cash out his Tesla profits, but Twitter immediately crashes? Smart move, that! I'm not completely sure Berenson fully understands this even now. Nevertheless, he raises a key point:

[E]ven before Musk bought Twitter, he’d shown warning signs he might not be the First Amendment absolutist those of us who had faced social media censorship in the last several years had hoped.

Through Tesla, he was deeply tied to China, which has used advanced technology to crack down on dissent more effectively than any other country. He had also aggressively chased would-be whistleblowers at Tesla, in one case forcing one to repay the company $400,000 for “leaking confidential information to a reporter.” His SpaceX launches American military satellites, among the most highly classified programs in the United States military.

Carl Benjamin, an often insightful UK commentator, ventures a question in this YouTube discussion: up to now, Twitter has almost never been profitable, but influential capital has nevertheless continued to fund it. Its ability to control public dialogue and the width of the Overton window has apparently been worth the investment.

The best we can say at the moment is that Musk has no clear view of where to take Twitter, especially in its current perceived position as an arbiter of acceptable views, but there is absolutely no assurance that Musk can somehow change the world by making changes there.

Any more than anyone thought there was going to be a red wave last Tuesday.

The Burn It Down Theory Of Management

The other day I noted that Elon seems to be making things up as he goes along with Twitter, and recent developments aren't changing my mind. This story goes into considerable detail about how last week's layoff process went down. Earlier, I quoted Musk on how if you think a policy would make a great Dilbert strip, it might be a bad policy, but the problem there is that Dilbert is supposed to be funny, and this saga is turning out to be anything but.

Friday’s layoffs had been brutal for all involved, including those involved in planning them — many of whom themselves lost their jobs. While the process varied by team, some managers were asked to submit to Musk’s team two sentences about all of their direct reports: one sentence explaining what the employee did, and one sentence justifying their continued employment at Twitter.

Wait a moment. "Those involved in planning them"? The new boss takes over and gives the company one week to lay off half its workforce? How do you "plan" any such thing?

As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.

. . . “Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

. . . Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.

Now workers fear that if they they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.

As of this morning,

Twitter’s most senior cybersecurity staffer Lea Kissner has departed the social media giant.

Kissner announced the move in a tweet on Thursday, saying they [sic] made the “hard decision” to leave Twitter, but did not say for what reason they resigned. Elon Musk completed a $44 billion takeover of Twitter two weeks ago, resulting in layoffs affecting more than half of the company and the departure of senior executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Legal Policy chief Vijaya Gadde.

News of Kissner’s departure was first reported by Casey Newton. Twitter’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran has also resigned, and reportedly so has chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty, according to Newton, citing messages shared in Twitter Slack.

Here I think there's a real probability that Musk is cutting meat. Cybersecurity is critically important to a social media company; you simply can't have the accounts of prominent people getting hacked, with the hackers using the online IDs of politicians, celebrities, and others to make posts that destroy their reputations. The mere inkling of any such risk will make people flee the platform. The most I can think is that before you replace the manager in charge of that team, you need to do a very, very careful review -- and I can't imagine that being done within a couple of weeks.

The same applies to compliance. Any corporation is bound by all sorts of government rules and regulations. Any sort of discontinuity, even just a perception, will hurt the company. Again, it's possible that everyone at the top is incompetent and needs to go, but at minimum, Musk has to maintain an impression of continuity. If the heads of cybersecurity and compliance quit in protest or frustration, though, so much the worse.

Nor do I find this reassuring: The Right Is Cheering Latest Twitter Move Concerning Head of 'Trust and Safety':

After Elon Musk took over Twitter, he seemed to give his imprimatur to Yoel Roth, the guy who had been the head of “Trust and Safety” for the site. “Trust and safety” dealt with things on the site like abuse, harassment, and “election security” in the past, before Musk came in.

But many pointed out to Musk that perhaps Roth wasn’t the best guy to render objective judgment on the platform, given the things that he has previously tweeted. They certainly indicate there could be a big problem in how he would exercise that judgment.

On Thursday, there were multiple reports that Roth, as well as the head of sales, Robin Wheeler, were no longer with the company.

. . . Did someone finally get the message that perhaps there could be a problem there? Folks on the right certainly found his leaving another positive sign.

So let me see. As of Monday, we had a reassuring tweet from Roth himself, which I linked here on Wednesday, that "trust and safety" were doing business as usual. This followed an October 31 tweet linked in the story from Musk expressing confidence in Roth. But by yesterday, that had all changed, and Roth was out the door. Maybe you can say that this shows Musk will listen, Musk will admit he's made mistakes, but why did Musk make a snap decision right after taking over that Roth was a good guy, but less than two weeks later, he was fired? Isn't there something wrong with this whole process?

And of course, Musk can change his mind again. He can still call up Roth over the weekend and threaten to revoke his severance if he doesn't report to work on Monday. If I were any of Musk's ten kids, I'd be looking to lock up my inheritance now.