An Elon Musk With Gravitas? Don't Be Too Sure.

I really have no comment to make on his recernt dire predictions about artificial intelligence -- either he doesn't understand it very well, or I don't, but this is a guy who has something like ten kids, all parented via surrogacy from what we can tell, along with an additional bunch of frozen embryos he made with Amber Heard. Allegedly. I'm going to trust my judgment over his in practically any matter, including what to do with Twitter.

On the other hand, he's unexpectedly said something smart:

Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “if anyone would know about aliens on Earth it would probably be me.”

“To the best of my knowledge, we see no evidence of conscious life anywhere in the universe,” Musk said. “So it might be there. You know, in physics they call it sort of the Fermi paradox after when Enrico Fermi, he’s an amazing physicist, asked the fundamental question, where are the aliens?”

“I’ve seen no evidence of aliens,” Musk said, adding that if he did he would instantly post about it on Twitter — a company that he purchased late last year and where he currently serves as CEO.

. . . He said the military, which is often suspected of hiding knowledge about aliens, would be acting in its own interest to disclose an extra-terrestrial threat. He paraphrased a defense official who once said the Pentagon would get carte blanche from taxpayers if it produced an alien.

Well, we got rare common sense from him on one issue, but then what about his fantasies of a Mars mission?

A crewed mission to Mars could happen in 2029, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hints.

A tweet on Monday comparing the moon landing to a future Mars landing attached a photo of the moon landing dated 1969, on top of an image of an envisioned Mars landing, labeled "20 --." The tweet, from Space_Hub, an account that posts about space and astronomy, read "What's your guess" and tagged Musk.

Two days after the tweet, Musk replied "2029."

Musk has long seen a visit to Mars as a goal. In 2016, he said he wanted to build a rocket capable of taking people to Mars and supporting a permanent city on the planet.

"It's something we can do in our lifetimes," he told an audience of 100,000 watchers at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. "You could go."

But Musk's older predictions don't necessarily match up with his latest. In 2016, he told the Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, that getting a "meaningful number of people" on Mars was possible "in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe nine years."

However, efforts to simulate Mars missions or a Mars colony have pretty uniformly ended in comical failure, a little like Musk's attempts to have a family. For instance,

For the past five years, small groups of people have made [a] drive [to the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii] and moved into [a] dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

In February of this year [2018], the latest batch of pioneers, a crew of four, made the journey up the mountain. They settled in for an eight-month stay. Four days later, one of them was taken away on a stretcher and hospitalized.

The remaining crew members were evacuated by mission support. All four eventually returned to the habitat, not to continue their mission, but to pack up their stuff. Their simulation was over for good. The little white dome has remained empty since, and the University of Hawaii, which runs the program, and nasa, which funds it, are investigating the incident that derailed the mission.

According to the Guardian,

In 1991, members of an experimental theater troupe undertook an audacious project to create a completely self-sustained ecosystem. At the Biosphere 2 facility in Arizona, a mixed-gender group of eight volunteers were enclosed in a giant terrarium, with water, plants and animals, for two years.

Tensions ran high; food, and eventually oxygen, ran low. The mission was only completed with the aid of emergency supplies smuggled in. In 1994 a second group tried, but were forced to end their mission early because of a power struggle in the Biosphere’s ownership.

Think of it -- an intrepid crew of astronauts reaches Mars only to be recalled due to conflicts in SpaceX's ownership. Sound believable? But since Mars mission or colony simulations seem mainly to fall apart due to personnel conflicts, it's worth noting that so far, even the most rigorous selection and training programs for astronauts seem to fall short of what would be needed to staff a Mars mission:

Lisa Marie Nowak (née Caputo, born May 10, 1963) is an American aeronautical engineer, convicted criminal, and former NASA astronaut and United States Navy officer. Nowak served as naval flight officer and test pilot in the Navy, and was selected by NASA for NASA Astronaut Group 16 in 1996. . . . In 2007, Nowak was involved in a highly publicized incident of criminal misconduct for which she eventually pled guilty to felony burglary and misdemeanor battery charges, resulting in her demotion from captain to commander, and termination by NASA and the Navy.

Her termination followed an extramarital affair with a second astronaut, something NASA culture has been unable to prevent despite adultery being a criminal offense in the US armed forces. What on earth can anyone do to prevent this sort of hanky-pank on a months-long flight to Mars, let alone in a colony staying for years? And if NASA can't prevent it, how can SpaceX?

There's more frivolity in outer space than just the aliens, and Elon Musk is hardly immune.

Bud Light, Marianne Williamson, And The McGovern Dilemma

Maybe it's my age, but in recent days I keep returning to the 1970s, rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade", thinking about the implications of the 1972 election, suddenly realizing that the Teixeira leaks are nothing but a reprise of the Pentagon Papers, and musing that this all carries lessons for the Bud Light fiasco. What brought me to focus on this was remarks by Marianne Williamson, a member of my 1970s demographic, that President Joe Biden “hasn’t done enough” for working-class Americans. She spoke at a restaurant in Dover, NH:

“Now, I am a Democrat. I am a Roosevelt Democrat. I believe that the Democratic Party should stand for unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States,” she went on to tell the restaurant.

“In order for us to win in 2024 and in order for us to repair this country, we have to be willing … to cut the cord with the last 50 years of history, we have to be willing to begin a new era,” Williamson said.

It's hard to determine what Ms Williamson means by cutting the cord with the last 50 years of history, but I would actually trace some part of the problem to the 1972 presidential election, in which the Democrats nominated George McGovern to run on a platform essentially the same as the one they've run on in most elections since, but in the process publicly lost the support of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, over McGovern's opposition to the Viet Nam War.

This in turn became a more general paradigm for the Democrat Party's loss of support from the working class over what Ms Williamson calls the last 50 years of history, and it's hard to think the 1972 election wasn't somewhere in the back of her mind when she said this. And she explicitly calls herself a Roosevelt Democrat, which can only refer to the New Deal alliance of the working class with the Ivy League-prep school upper class embodied in figures like Averell Harriman and Roosevelt himself.

Ms Williamson, however, is more a creature of the Me Decade than the New Deal, prep school, the Ivy League, or the working class, having bypassed the upper-class rites of adultood to do drugs and lead a New Age church. Me Decade types in fact have far less commitment to either party, being essentially hedonistic and narcissistic, which probably is what links them to the current gentry, who fancy theselves more or less non-partisan. This brings us to Bud Light. Brendan Whitworth, the CEO of Budweiser, is a registered Republican. Donald Trump Jr defended Budweiser fior donating slightly more to Republicans than Democrats.

Indeed, Alissa Heinerscheid, who approved Bud Light's partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, could easily be Ms Williamson's granddaughter; the loyalty of both is to their affluent bobo lifestyle, not to any solidarity with the working class. It was Mr Whitworth, the registered Republican (although of the CIA and Harvard Business School faction of Republicans) who belatedly acknowledged that "Anheuser-Busch employs more than 18,000 people and our independent distributors employ an additional 47,000 valued colleagues." Thus Trump fils complains that hurting Bud Light hurts Republicans, while Mr Whitworth adds that hurting Bud Light by the way also hurts the working class, or at least that part of the working class that sells Bud Lignt.

Neither Ms Williamson nor Ms Heinerscheid was available for comment. The working class is not in their wheelhouse.

The Statement Mr Whitworth released on Friday, and the subsequent new "spirit of America" Clydesdale ad, is an attempt to press the reset button back to bland without acknowledging the blunder. As this writer put it,

While [Trump Jr] might want the boycott to end, it looks like a large chunk of people have no interest in doing that, and this video is not going to fix the situation. All of a sudden playing on patriotism isn’t going to fix this problem. Anheuser-Busch still has a long way to go to fix this PR nightmare. It might eventually happen, but this isn’t the fix they’re looking for.

Ms Williamson has essentially the same approach. At her New Hampshire appearance, after paying lip service to the working class, she went on,

“There is no reason why we in this country do not have universal health care, do not have a guaranteed livable wage, do not have free college tuition, do not have paid family leave, and do not have guaranteed sick pay.”

She also hit Biden for not being radical enough on climate change. Specifically, Williamson criticized his administration’s approval of a “$39 billion-dollar project to export liquified natural gas from Alaska,” arguing that “this is at a time when scientists are telling us that we absolutely must be ramping down, not ramping up, fossil fuel extraction.”

Issues like climate change and free college are for the one percent and the college-educated gentry, not the working class, who are fully aware that their taxes will pay for the gentry's kids' college, and electric cars and trucks will make it more expensive for them to get to work. Appeals to McGovern-era Democrat chestnuts won't work any better than appeals to patriotism to make people forget the corporate elites are catering to the latest trans darlings of the rich.

But at least Ms Williamson is saying words that reflect we're still in the 1970s, like it or not.

What About Ukraine?

The two intelligence experts I quoted yesterday (if that's what they are) are in agreement that the documents in the Teixeira leaks are valid, and they suggest an imminent reassessment of Western policy. But the overall context of the war had begun to convince me that there was going to have to be a reassessment whether secret documents were released or not. An expected winter counteroffensive didn't take place, while the consensus now is that the spring counteroffensive has been delayed.

Here is a CNN assessment from last Friday of what the Teixeira documents say about the Ukraine war. It's worth noting that the US right has been opposed to the war from the start, while CNN, aligned with the left, has up to now supported it. Somne of the documents

divulge key weaknesses in Ukrainian weaponry, air defense, and battalion sizes and readiness at a critical point in the war, as Ukrainian forces gear up to launch a counteroffensive against the Russians – and just as the US and Ukraine have begun to develop a more mutually trusting relationship over intelligence-sharing.

. . . Yet another document describes, in remarkable detail, a conversation between two senior South Korean national security officials about concerns by the country’s National Security Council over a US request for ammunition.

The officials worried that supplying the ammunition, which the US would then send to Ukraine, would violate South Korea’s policy of not supplying lethal aid to countries at war. According to the document, one of the officials then suggested a way of getting around the policy without actually changing it – by selling the ammunition to Poland.

The problem of ammunition is troubling. This story goes into more detail on current Ukrainian weaknesses, agaain based on the Teixeira documents:

The planned Ukrainian late Spring offensive could be a death trap for the US, NATO and even America’s Asian allies.

A brigade is normally between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers. Using the higher number, Ukraine is planning to commit 60,000 troops in the counteroffensive, focused on an effort to break Russia’s control over Black Sea ports other than Sevastopol.

However, it is likely Ukraine will launch some sort of simultaneous attack on Crimea and Sevastopol, if it can.

. . . The planned counteroffensive, despite US and NATO support, faces some significant obstacles. The nine US-NATO-equipped brigades have less armor than promised by NATO.

. . . maintaining a gaggle of dissimilar equipment will not be easy and field repairs will be next to impossible. This will pose a significant challenge to the Ukrainians, who also will have no equipment reserves to replace what may be lost in battle.

. . . The lack of ammunition is also a major problem to support the promised offensive, even to continue the war itself.

Consider for example ammunition for artillery. The US has supplied 155mm howitzers, mostly with high explosive shells. The M-777 howitzer has a range of around 21 kilometers (13 miles). By now, Ukraine has fired off nearly 1 million 155mm shells, a huge amount.

According to the Pentagon report, there are none in the pipeline right now. While some additional thousands may be found, given the huge rate of expenditure by the Ukrainian army, it is hard to see how the 155mm will help very much in the planned offensive (assuming these artillery pieces survive Russian airstrikes, a big assumption).

The Federalist, aligned with opposition to the war from the right, draws similar conclusions from the Teixeira leaks:

What the documents also suggest, as if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is that the war has not been an unbroken chain of brilliant underdog battlefield victories for Ukraine and crushing defeats for Russia, as the corporate media and the Washington political establishment have led us to believe.

. . . One of the results of this slow, grinding warfare has been the rapid expenditure of munitions, at least on the Ukrainian side. U.S. weapons stockpiles are now badly depleted, and our defense industrial base is taxed to the point that we have been unable to deliver some $20 billion in promised military supplies to Taiwan. This of course raises the question of China, which the Biden administration, along with Republican leaders in Congress, refuse to talk about candidly in the context of the Ukraine war.

. . . From where the situation stands now, it seems like the U.S. taxpayer has unwittingly bought nothing more than a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, one that increasingly runs a very real risk of ending in a nuclear showdown. Absent a hard push from Washington for peace negotiations — the one thing our leaders seem unwilling even to consider — we’re left with bad options all around: escalation and inevitable U.S. involvement on the one hand, or total abandonment of Ukraine on the other.

Let's recall that Zelensky's argument a year ago for Western support in a war against Russia was that it would be a bargain -- Ukraine would do all the fighting with maybe just leftover Warsaw Pact weapons, and the Russian empire would quickly collapse. Up to last fall, that was a sustainable argument, burt after partial success in the Donbas, the string of underdog battlefield victories stopped, the winter counteroffensive never happened, and the attritional battle in Bakhmut appears to have depleted Western weapons to the point that there may no longer be aa credible deterrent to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

And last year I noted that Zelensky himself looked like a wartime leader at the Lincoln or Churchill level -- but Lincoln and Churchill were able to make their cases over periods of years, until battlefield success supported their calls for resoluteness and sacrifice. Zelensky, again after last fall, has been much more quiet, while the prospect of quick Ukrainian success, for instance in recapturing Crimea, appears less and less likely.

And of course, Joe Biden seems more and more detached from his job, willing to let his various surrogates push for their own programs as long as he doesn't have to work very hard. There will need to be stronger leadership than this over the next year to avoid an endless and hugely expensive stalemate, which is what Zelensky in particular promised we wouldn't have.

Does Anyone Believe One Word Of This Jack Teixeira Story?

Starting with the original line that Jack Teixeira's online group was a bunch of right-wing racists. (Teixeira is a Hispanic surname, from any of the places in Portugal and Spain named Teixeira). The US Census Bureau defines "Hispanic" as either someone with a surname that is carried on the Bureau's list of Hispanic surnames, or someone who lived in a household where he or she spoke Spanish as a child. Perhaps the New York Times, among others, could revive the term "white Hispanic".

But beyond that, subsequent accounts have quoted a member of his online group that described him as "Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what’s going on,” which would actually fit Christian antiwar protesters of past generations like the Berrigan brothers, Roman Catholic priests who led the antiwar and antidraft movements during the Vietnam War. Neither was a right-wing racist.

But that leaves aside the bigger question of just what the heck is going on here. When I worked in tech, it was sometimes in classified environments. Mr Teixera was a low-level enlisted member whose job was basically to push a cart around the office with spare keyboards and network cables on it. As the link above puts it,

As a cyber transport systems specialist — a military equivalent of an IT specialist — Teixeria was responsible for military communications networks and would have had a higher level of security clearance because he would have also been tasked with ensuring protection for the networks, a defense official told the Associated Press.

Well, ensuring protection of the networks insofar as it involved pushing a cart around the office. But let's say that one day he was pushing his cart around to replace some colonel's keyboard and saw a stack of TOP SECRET documents just left out for anyone to see, and he thought, "gee, my racist right-wing buddies in my online gaming group would love to get their hands on these!" Leaving aside that you're not supposed to leave TOP SECRET documents just lying around for some dude to see while he's pushing a cart, once Mr Teixeira left the building, any cart he pushed, anything he carried, would be inspected, and he'd be busted instantly for having that stuff.

I've been in that environment. You have to be constantly aware of what you're carrying and whether you should be taking it outside. And in fact, most of it is overclassified and utterly harmless if it gets out, but the rules are the rules, and to work in that environment, you have to follow the rules. So just as someone who sometimes worked in a classified environment along with the guys who pushed the carts around, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But don't just take my word for it:

Kash Patel, former chief of staff at the Pentagon and former deputy director of National Intelligence, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Friday, questioned the evolving narrative over the Pentagon leaks — specifically that a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard reservist acted alone to leak top secret military data.

Patel, a former federal prosecutor, said he does not believe “for a single second, this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran this operation alone.”

Patel said, first, the suspected leaker, Jack Teixeira, would not have had access to the information without someone within the Department of Defense (DOD) or the intelligence community giving it to him, providing it to him, or telling him it should be put out there. “It’s just not possible,” he said.

This generally fits with my experience. Classified information basically doesn't sit on someone's desk where a guy pushing a cart can find it, and the guy pushing a cart would have to know what it was worth even if he found it -- and that leaves aside how he could get hundreds of paper pages out of the secured facility without being searched and caught. Trust me, any time I left work at a classified facility, any briefcase, any manila envelope, any book or magazine I had, was thumbed through. Patel goes on,

“That the New York Times and Washington Post ‘broke’ this story, that also leads me to believe it’s the same tradecraft from Russiagate, that when deep state actors want stuff out there, they put it out to their sources,” he said. “Am I to believe that these two newspapers found this guy out first, before the FBI? That’s absurd. That’s the timeline we’re being told. So now, we have better investigators at the New York Times and the Washington Post than in the FBI?”

Patel's conclusion is at least credible:

He said the intelligence shows that the Pentagon and President Joe Biden have been lying to the American people about how well the Ukraine War was doing.

“I think the substance of the intel…it says basically, our effort in the Ukraine, our $100 billion effort, is failing,” he said.

A different source who's from a different political faction has a somewhat similar take:

Former CIA officer Larry Johnson, who did presidential daily briefings during the George H.W. Bush administration, told "Judging Freedom" host Andrew Napolitano that he thinks the latest leak of Ukraine War documents is an inside job.

This is the same Larry Johnson who, not long before the 9/11 attack, minimized the threat of Islamic terrorism and said, "The danger, I think that has happened is we've tended to make Osama bin Laden as sort of a superman in Muslim garb. I mean,he's 10 feet tall, he's everywhere, he knows everyhthing and bhe can't be challenged." So although he's well past his sell-by date, here's what he's had to say about the Teixeira case:

"The information was leaked for [a purpose], to prepare the U.S. public for the crash landing that's going to take place with respect to U.S. foreign policy," he said.

This is a coordinated media strategy, this is a disinformation campaign. The documents are real. I’m not saying the documents are fabrications, they are not. But this cover story that's been manufactured to explain how these documents came to be produced, it just falls apart. It simply falls apart based on one document, which is listed as "CIA Operations Center Report: Top Secret." I worked in the CIA operations center, and I helped prepare those reports, that's an internal CIA document. No one on a U.S. military base anywhere in the world will have access to that kind of document.

So just as a now-and-then visitor to the classified world, I'm seeing things that don't fit, but people who've been at or near the top of that environment are also seeing things that make them ask what's really going on. Unfortunately, the reporters are still getting over spring break, and the stories so far are days old. We'll just have to wait and see.

Everybody Has A Boss

So after two weeks of radio silence, Anheuser Busch sent out its US CEO to issue a bland non-apology for the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. I went looking for pictures of Brendan Whitworth, and what I found was what you'd expect -- he's a pretty boy, there to look good at employee town halls, but someone else is running the show. People have been parsing out just what he intended to say in his statement, but I think the real lesson in this episode is that everyone has a boss, including the US CEO of Anheuser.

Over a two-wwek period when Bud Light went radio silent on social media, yuou can bet there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter between New York and Brussels, where Mr Whitworth's bosses are, about the impact of the Dyhlan Mulvaney controversy, with Whitworth giving happy talk, the way pretty boy CEOs do, about how this is just a blip, it'll all blow over, and so forth.

Finally the bosses in Brussels lost patience and told him to say something, except by this point he was between a rock and a hard place, and his speechwriters were forced to write about the only thing they could -- after all, if he came out and said it was a big mistake and apologized, he'd have hundreds of screaming trans guys storming company headquarters, while if he said an elaborate bunch of nothing, things would work themselves out, and the bosses would be happy. More or less.

According to the UK Daily Mail,

According to sources cited by the Daily Wire, 'no one at a senior level' was aware of the Mulvaney brand partnership before it launched, and the campaign was undertaken by a 'low-level marketing staffer.'

Executives have 'paused' new marketing campaigns so they can implement a more robust vetting process for future projects, according to the report.

While media attention has focused on Bud Light VP Alissa Heinerscheid for her potential role overseeing the campaign, [marketing and PR expertr Gareth] Boyd argued that responsibility for overseeing protocols to approve new marketing campaigns ultimately falls with the company's CEO.

. . . Boyd questioned whether proper contingency planning was carried out at Anheuser-Busch before launching the partnership with Mulvaney, saying it appeared the company did not have a response plan in place.

'You would have thought they would have had something saying, "okay, in a worst case scenario of backlash, what do we fall back to?"' he said.

I think the answer there is simple: they didn't have a contingency plan because nobody ever thought they'd need one. There was just no inkling that this would be remotely controversial. My guess is that the "sources' who talked to the Daily Wire were in Brussels, not New York, and they're asking, or should be asking, who hired Alissa Heinerscheid and who thought it would be a good idea to let her think she had a free rein on Bud Light's branding. That's the one who should be fired.

But this brings us to the next question: has Alissa been fired? The fact checkers say

No, Bud Light’s VP for marketing hasn’t been fired. Her Linkedin profile still describes her as the vice president of the brand and the “first female to lead the largest beer brand in the industry.”

Moreover, there aren’t any official reports or press releases from Budweiser confirming that she has lost her job.

But this YouTuber has better insight:

First, corporations don't normally issue press releases saying anyone's been fired. At most, a CEO who's gotten into hot water with the board will make a statement that he's leaving to spend more time with his family. Farther down, all that happens is that the person's extension will just keep ringing. If you try to call the switchboard to ask about it, they'll just reply they're sorry, that person isn't an employee here. (It's happened to me.)

But I think the YouTuber above has it right: that Alissa has deleted her LinkedIn profile is as good a sign as any that she's out. I'd say there's a good chance she showed up at her office one day last week and found it had someone else's name on the door, and when she asked about it, she was told she was not an employee there, if she even needed to ask.

But if she did ask, or if she hired an attorney to pursue the matter, I think there would be two clear grounds for termination. The first would be, as the sources intimated to The Daily Wire, that she exceeded her authority in approving the partnership deal, notwithstanding her superiors in New York would likely have approved it even if she'd asked. The second would be that, in the videos she made in the week or so before the Dylan Mulvaney deal went public, she spoke to media without going through the corporate PR department. That'll get anyone escorted out the door.

This leaves aside the question of how many MBA types get away with this sort of thing every day of the week, but that's related to the question of why despots tolerate flagrant corruption among their vassals. They tolerate it until it's convenient to send them to a firing squad for flagrant corruption. An effective corporate system makes sure anyone can be fired for a good excuse that's already right there on the shelf.

Everybody has a boss, including Brendan Whitworth, who's basically just there to look pretty.

William Barr Is The Energizer Bunny

William Barr is still holding to the theory that some sort of Establishment -- into which he has special insight -- is pushing the various cases against Trump in order to stampede Republicans into nominating him as a sure loser for 2024. I've said here that at minimum, this violates the law of parsimony, since it's too complicated a theory. Alan Dershowitz, a smarter guy, has been putting forward a simpler theory all along, which agrees with public statements by Trump's current prosecutor Alvin Bragg, that his indictment is meant simply to prevent Trump's 2024 candidacy in the first place.

Barr made his case on Trump most recently last night:

“I said he’s frequently his own worst enemy and he digs himself holes,” Barr said on CNN Primetime on Thursday night. “And he does some things that are reckless that are clearly gonna give rise to investigations and look into them. And that included both the documents in Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 episode.”

. . . Barr has been openly critical of Trump since leaving his administration, even saying last week that Trump is the “most likely” GOP candidate to lose to President Biden in a hypothetical 2024 presidential election. Barr stepped down as attorney general, apparently at Trump’s request, in his final month as president and just before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The problem for Barr is that other legal analysts have been saying that all the potential cases against Trump are varying levels of flimsy, including the Mar-a-Lago documents case that Barr mentions. On that matter:

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, who serves as a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said President Joe Biden’s document haul and those found during the FBI raid at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last August will “neutralize” each other.

This will make it difficult for the Justice Department to make anything stick, he said.

“The end result here, by the way, will be a tie. Each of these allegations neutralizes the other,” Dershowitz said Friday evening in an interview with The National Desk.

“It means that it’s impossible that Donald Trump will ever be prosecuted for his mishandling of classified information at Mar-a-Lago, and obviously, the special prosecutor will not prosecute President Biden,” he added.

Now, it's certainly possible that even if Prof Dershowitz says these cases are weak, prosecutors will bring them anyhow, as indeed Alvin Bragg has done in the face of prior decisions not to go ahead with the New York indictment. The difficulty is the practical effect of bringing them. Up to now, Mr Barr has scoffed at Trump's rise in the Republican polls as an indication that they will simply nominate him as a loser in the general election. But this isn't such a sure thing now:

[N]ot once during the 2020 election did the average of [Real Clear Politics] national polls show Trump with a lead. Throughout the campaign, the closest Trump came to Biden was a four-point deficit.

Today, the RealClearPolitics poll of national polls shows Trump with an outright lead of 1.7 points. It bears repeating that this never happened once in 2020. Even left-wing pollsters show Trump doing well. The Marquette poll shows a tie. Quinnipiac only has Biden up two points. Rasmussen, one of the only pollsters that show Biden with a respectable approval rating, has Trump up by seven.

As I've been saying here, none of this is predictive so far in advance of the 2024 election. On the other hand, it does begin to refute any attempt by Mr Barr and others to discount Trump's potential candidacy on the basis that he's popular only with the Republican base and will surely lose in a general election -- at least, "if present trends continue", which is never a sound assumption.

But what this data does support is that the Bragg indictment is playing to Trump's strategy, which is to use the media itself to keep him in the media, and we might well begin to assume that the second wave of Republicans who are currently announcing or exploring 2024 candicacies, like Gov Haley and Sen Scott, are actually angling for the vice presidential spot. Even Vivek Ramaswamy, with no political experience, likely wants to raise his profile in anticipation of a cabinet appointment.

And what nobody's mentioned so far is that the Trump surge is also feeding off the Bud Light controversy, which industry observers say has gained surprising traction:

Backlash to Bud Light’s celebration of transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney’s "365 Days of Girlhood" doesn’t appear to be dwindling.

"This boycott seems to have more legs than most," Justin Kendall, editor of beer industry trade publication Brewbound, told the New York Post.

"It started out as a conversation on social media and has breached into mainstream media," Kendall said. "Bud Light is the best-selling beer in the country."

If it's in mainstream media, it's there right next to The Donald. The stories play against each other. I simply don't know if prosecutors in Florida, Georgia, and Washington will ever recognize that additional indictments on flimsy cases will do precisely what they don't want -- keep Trump in the nightly news month after month, portraying him as the one figure the establishment can't tolerate in the political process. They'll make Trump's case for him -- and Prof Dershowitz even makes the point that not only can he run for office from a prison cell, he can serve as president from there, too.

If there's a monolithic establishment behind the scenes making the decision to indict Trump -- which Mr Barr seems to think, and he even seems to think he's part of it -- they've in fact got to be wondering if maybe it's going backfire on them if they keep it up.

So I Reread Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade"

Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is impressionistic and somewhat scattershot, but it's peppered with insights that are still productive almost two generations later. Wolfe is not a systematic social theorist, but one point he makes throughout his writing is that the American working class isn't behaving the way a proletariat should -- instead, in an era of prosperity, they take the money and run.

I reread the essay because, reading Emma Jo Morris's series on Survivors of the Trans Panic, she mentions gnosticism, and I recalled that Tom Wolfe mentioned it there as well. Speaking of New Age movements like Arica, Esalen, and Scientology that characterized the 1970s, he said,

I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.

It looks like Wolfe wrote this essay right before Star Wars premiered, but the Force fits into this scheme as another 1970s manifestation. This is also consistent with accounts given by detransitioners in the Emma Jo Morris series. For instance,

"The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite,” Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), told Breitbart News. “You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.”

The objection many raise to Dylan Mulvaney's public persona isn't that it's "almost fake", it's that it's completely fake. Some use the term "womanface" instead of "blackface". But as with New Age cults and religions, transgenderism is sold as a therapeutic solution to life's problems. Morris quotes Pamela Garfield-Jaeger in another essay in her series on transgender:

"I don’t understand it, in terms of from the professional side, how they can believe in this,” Garfield-Jaeger told Breitbart. “I understand how a person can be tricked to believe in it if they’re told, ‘All of your pain and suffering will go away if you take this, almost, magic pill,’ which is become transgender, and then you get all this positive reinforcement.”

. . . She said that “naive” mental health providers, though, are acting out of codependence, as they do not “affirm” any number of other maladaptive behaviors, such as drug addiction or eating disorders.

. . . “If you look at other disorders — of course now they don’t want to call it a disorder, they compare it more to an immutable characteristic, but we know that’s not the case because people are choosing to do it — if you look at other mental health issues, like an eating disorder, or drug addiction, you don’t have institutions being, like, ‘Well you need to affirm their addiction,’ ‘We need to affirm their eating disorder.'”

Tom Wolfe has another important insight in "The Me Decade":

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me.

Wolfe attributes these aspirations to women, or at least women of the prosperous 1960s and 1970s, and the slogan was clearly meant to influence women of that time -- but the implication now is that it applies even more to transgender pseudo-women like Dylan Mulvaney. Wolfe is no longer around to draw new conclusions from this, but it seems convincing that the transgender movement is yet another outcome of the 1960s cultural changes.