Good News?

 "Lula" (Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva) has beaten Jair "Trump With an Actual Tan" Bolsonaro. The election was far too close (50.9% to 49.1%) and that only means that Bolsonaro can embrace a Trumpist rejection of the election results.

On January 6th, there were too many members of law enforcement and the military who were either too slow to respond or too slow to take the threat seriously, but for the most part, senior law enforcement and military figures were on the right side of history. Brazil's democracy is far newer and more fragile and Bolsonaro has closer ties to the military than Trump ever did.

Hopefully, the Brazilian military does the right thing and keeps this vile man from usurping power.

Worth keeping an eye on.

What My Students Just Taught Me

 Every year, I have my Comp Gov students write a paper on the electoral systems of either France, South Africa or Japan. They are basically asked to see if these elections are democratically legitimate and functioning as intended by their design. Short answer: France and South Africa are democratically legitimate and Japan's elections are kinda sketchy.

I just read the papers on France and the students overwhelmingly argued that France's elections weren't democratically legitimate because when two unpopular candidates - like Macron and Le Pen - advance to the second round, people are pissed about their choices. Typically, the French vote FOR someone in the first round of their elections and AGAINST someone in the second, but in that first round, they get to choose from a robust slate of candidates - usually over 10. So, you can vote for the Green Party in round one, but then compromise and vote for Macron in the second.

The mindset that people might not like the result is an interesting one, and it was not a position students took even a few years back. On some level, this is politics as retail activity. I ordered a specific item and if I don't get a specific item, I get my money back. The idea that I might have to compromise doesn't enter in to modern consumerism. You can find just about anything online and have it at your door in a few days. 

That's not how politics works. 

Here's the thing: I like Joe Biden well enough. I think he's a decent president and pretty good guy with some very human flaws. That Obama fellow - great guy, great politician, decent policy chops. But I will never have a Biden or Obama flag displayed in front of my house. That's just...weird AF. 

You see the opposite of this, of course, with the Trump cultists. His flaws don't exist and supporting him becomes a litmus test. However, you can also see it when you talk to young people about Biden running again in 2024. He's an old fogey (true); he's not a charismatic communicator (true); he doesn't address things young people care about (false). The first two are "vibes" the last is a misconception that arises from those vibes.

Biden isn't a consumer brand. He's just an old school Irish pol. And that's fine, unless you need him to be your best friend and messiah. And that's just weird.

The Attempted Assassination of Nancy Pelosi

 Paul Campos is right that the media framing of the attack on Paul Pelosi is better understood as an attempted assassination of the Speaker of the House and calling it an attempted murder hides what's really going on here. It will be natural for GOP leaders to dismiss the guy who did it as a mentally ill person, and there is no doubt that he is not 100% rational or mentally stable. The problem is that the constant ad hominem demonizing of Democrats finds really fertile soil among the conspiratorially minded fringes and brings them into the GOP fold.

GOP leaders have (for the most part) condemned the attack, but they will deflect from their role in creating the conditions that led to it. The GOP's transition to the GQP seems pretty complete.

Campos notes Robert Paxton's definition of fascism in his piece:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

That's pretty much the GOP. 

If there is a hidden reservoir of Democratic voters who aren't being picked up in the polls, and Democrats overperform next week, the GQP will say that this was a "false flag" attack to bolster support for Socialists. Bank on it.

Iran Explainer

 Good piece by Martin Longman about the echoes of the 1978 revolution in today's protests. All the stuff about the 40 mourning cycle is spot on.

One thing I would add: the Shah fell because the military refused to support increasingly brutal crackdowns. Longman argues that the Revolutionary Guard will not turn on the regime, because they literally are the regime. What this leaves out was the role America and Jimmy Carter had in reining in the worst responses the Shah could have reached for. We encouraged reform and, as Tocqueville said, "the most dangerous moment for a bad regime is the moment it tries to reform itself."

There is no external force that can rein in the Revolutionary Guard. There is only the clerics - the ulema - who can break with the regime and deny it legitimacy. Iranian clerics are not monolithic.

If the Iranian regime falls, it will fall the way every other Iranian regime has fallen since 1900: because the ulema decides it has had enough.

Global Sadness

 David Brooks argues that we are in a growing tide of "global sadness" based on global polling. The main culprits are - he and the author he cites claim - loss of community, food insecurity and simple physical pain.

Loss of community I can totally see. We are a balkanized world of isolated people in crowded spaces. Social media ironically exacerbates this by amplifying those feelings of being alone in a crowded world. Food insecurity is surprising, given the decrease in global poverty, especially at the poorest levels. Same goes for physical pain.

I wonder if we aren't looking at a "relative deprivation" model where people are measuring themselves against a global elite whom they see on their TVs and other devices. A farmer in Nigeria had no way of knowing what life was like in London; now he does. 

I heard a line the other day, "Comparison is the thief of joy." We are constantly measuring ourselves against impossible standards. That can't help but make us miserable, and the worst part is, we do it to ourselves. 

I don't know what to do about this, but unhappy people are revolutionary people (look at Iran). Revolutions are usually more destructive than constructive. Not sure where we go from here.

How About Some Good News?

 Climate is looking better.

It's Time

 Putin is making a blustering speech about how the West is to blame for the war in Ukraine. He's making his usual vague threats.

I have a hunch we will be seeing Ukraine launch their fall offensive soon. They rested and regrouped by the September offensive and they have three possible axes of attack: Donetsk, towards Melitopol and grinding down Kherson. Personally - without knowing shit about the dispossession of Russian defensive positions, I would think a strike towards Melitopol and then moving west towards encircling Kherson would force Russia to withdraw or risk being surrounded. Liberating the Zaporizkzhia nuclear power plant would also be a huge plus.

Or maybe Russia has that area well defended. Still, they need to make more gains before the winter sets in, and I would expect something sooner rather than later.

Yglesias On His Shit Again

 While I find Yglesias interesting some of the time, at others he's a great example of the flaw of Philosophy majors becoming policy guys. By that, I mean the reliance on deductive reasoning. Philosophers have a set of ideas that they use to understand the world, but that can lead to forcing the world through that lens. I think I've written about the Fox and the Hedgehog before, but basically a Fox knows many small things and the Hedgehog knows one big thing. Foxes are much better at predicting the future, because their broad range of knowledge exempts them from a sort of Dunning-Kruger knock-on effect. They know what they don't know, but they also know a lot of other little things. They are better with uncertainty.

Yglesias' Big Idea is in his book One Billion Americans, and he tends to focus enormous time to arguing about NIMBYism and other restraints in American population growth. He's absolutely right that America should be embracing more immigrants, but he tries to force the current China/US economic warfare through this lens and it just feels off.

Additionally, I think we already HAVE one billion Americans, but not in the way Yglesias typically argues. If you add up the population of the United States, the EU, Japan and various post-colonial British countries, you get close to a billion people. There are obvious political implications for increased global connectedness that manifest in jingoism that we saw in Brexit, but the Global West is a thing, and we are seeing that in real time in support for Ukraine. 

This is why the current status of the United States is such an important inflection point. The world need the US to be a global force for democracy and some aspects of free markets. Trumpism repudiates not only democracy at home, but democratic ideals abroad.

Foolish Vs Evil

 There have been two examples of Left wing activists stepping on their own Johnsons recently. In the US, it's a letter from the Progressive Caucus that Josh Marshall thinks was leaked by the Quincy Institute to advocate for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. First of all, it's Ukraine's war to negotiate or not. Secondly, any negotiated settlement would have to include the pre-2014 borders. Since Russia won't go for that, what's the point? No one is "for" the war, they are for a Ukrainian victory, because this is a historic crime against them.

In Europe we have a bunch of dingbat climate activists throwing soup and potatoes on paintings and then gluing themselves to shit for reasons. What does this have to do with climate change? Of anything it discredits people who are actually trying to address the problem via guilt by association. 

Foolish, short-sighted efforts like this are par for the course for a certain segment of activists. It's the attention, it's "getting the message out there" in ways that short-circuit actual policy goals.

Meanwhile, GOP activists want to end democracy, kill their political enemies and enforce birth control bans.

So...same thing really...

Rishi Sunak

 Britain will have a Prime Minister of South Asian descent. While the Conservative Party was poisoned by Brexit, it's worth noting that all three female PMs in Britain's history were women and now their first PM who is not ethnically "British" (English, Welsh or Scottish) will be a Conservative as well.

The Conservative Party has some bad ideas. Liz Truss and Brexiteers had the worst ideas. But they don't lean into racism and sexism to win elections, so good for them.

The Chairman

 Xi Jinping has succeeded in overturning Deng Xiaoping's structural reforms of the Chinese Communist Party that have been in place since Mao's death. Deng put into place a party leadership structure that was inclusive of the various factions within the Party and required the regular rotation of leaders. No General Secretary could serve more than two five-year terms. The Politburo Standing Committee was made up of the various factions within the Party and was intended to end what Mao called "Reds over Experts." Mao had favored ideological purity over technocratic competence, and Deng turned that around. The result was the "Chinese Miracle" of 1990 until today.

Xi has ended the rotation in office and has picked a Politburo based on loyalty to him rather than factional representation or expertise. What is so incredibly striking about all this is that we have real-time evidence of the failures of this sort of ideological purity and personal loyalty over expertise in China's most important ally, Russia. A few years ago, Putin put someone who was actually competent in charge of his military, but when that guy called out corruption, he was sacked. We are seeing the consequences of that in Ukraine.

Dictatorships trade short term efficiency for long term flexibility. The absolute fustercluck in Britain is chaotic, but it also represents a Tory government that should not be in power being removed from power. Liz Truss should not be Prime Minister, so she will not be Prime Minister. If Rishi Sunak becomes PM, he has two years to turn the country around, or he will be bounced from office. (If it's Boris Johnson, I can't imagine how they escape dysfunction leading to an election.)

Democracies give up the messy dramas playing out in Westminster, but they also allow for the correction of mistakes. Xi's elimination of even the "behind closed doors dissent" will most likely weaken China in the long run. His Zero Covid policy is already a disaster that a more flexible CCP would have walked away from. Xi can't and won't.

Please Read This

 Paul Campos on attention seekers vs fame; narcissism vs validation.

Where Does My Dread Come From?

 I've been optimistic about Democratic chances in the midterms until quite recently. My optimism was based on Dobbs and how Democrats were outperforming the polls in actual election results. Three things have changed my mind.

The first is the unrelenting a dire emails I get for fundraising. I "get" why they are scaring us into contributing. However, I don't think left of center people necessarily respond well to fear-based appeals. That works great on right of center people, but I just worry it will depress turnout in an election that will fundamentally turn on getting your voters to the polls.

The second is that Republicans latched on to two stories: inflation and crime. Those were the issues that elevated Reagan and they are impervious to "well, actually" factual appeals. Crime is down, but because we observe everything, videos of people committing crimes proliferate. Inflation, while real, is a global phenomenon. This is not a Democratic policy failure, but that simply won't matter.

Finally, the dire emails mesh with a sense of Republican triumphalism and predictions of a Red Wave. Of course, the polling is terribly unreliable and both sides are locked into their epistemic bubbles.

My hope in September was that the GOP's awful candidates, the persistent grip of Trumpism and the inability to squeeze any more gerrymanders out of the House would allow the Dems to beat back the historical tide. When the GOP did not abandon Herschel Walker, I began to wonder what they were seeing. The idea of Walker actually being a US Senator is just appalling. He's  brain damaged and mentally unwell.

Yet he's got a real chance of winning. I don't know what to say about that.

As I've Been Saying

 For a long time, I've argued that the "conservative" movement is simply not conservative in any meaningful sense. It's deeply reactionary. As Paul Campos notes, the jackbooted authoritarians at The Federalist have finally come out and identified as such.

The Revanchist Right has told is exactly who they are. They want forced birth. They want to guy Social Security and Medicare. They want to outlaw same sex marriage. They want to kill prisoners whose guilt may or may not exist. They want to punish corporations and individual citizens who disagree with them.

As Campos notes, if you really believe the shit about Biden being a Socialist who's trying to turn your kid trans, then this form of anti-democratic politics makes sense.

What's depressing is that we are about to hand one of the branches of government to these authoritarian theocrats because of global inflation and scare stories about crime.

Sadly Hilarious

 Liz Truss was outlasted by the lettuce. In what is now the shortest tenured prime ministership in history, Luz Truss managed to screw up in just about every possible way a "leader" can. Truss was always a rank opportunist, but the thing about being a PM, is you actually have to be good at your job, or your party will sack you.

One of the funnier Tweets I saw this morning was Anthony Scaramucci himself saying that Truss lasted 4.5 Scaramucci units. (In case, you forgot, the Mooch was brought on board Trump's White House to solidify their communications department and lasted 10 days.) The thing is: Trump's manifest dysfunction and incompetence was visible to everyone close to him. The number of McMasters and Kellys and even Barrs with "tell all" memoirs about what a shitshow Trump was are thick on the ground. 

But we were stuck with him.  And if Republicans do as well as I fear in a couple of weeks, we may set up his return to power.

In Britain, if the PM becomes a liability...well, ask Liz Truss.

All of this - every last bit of it - is a byproduct of the Brexit fiasco. Brexit was absolute shite policy that the wiser heads in Parliament wouldn't touch. But David Cameron thought he could puncture the anti-EU bubble with a referendum. Instead, he has damned near wrecked his country and certainly his party. Brexit gave us the clownish farce of Boris Johnson and now the complete erosion of basic competence of Truss.

Brexit also was the bellwether of Trump. Based on nativist and racist assumptions about immigrants and the non-English, Brexit was a populist pack of lies pushed by cynical assholes like Nigel Farage, for whom racism was both a deeply held belief and a ploy for power. 

The Conservative Party - at least its Parliamentary members - mostly knows that Brexit was a terrible idea and is destroying their country's economy and place of standing in the world. Still, in much the same way the GOP catered to Trump (Mitch McConnell after the election of 2020: "What does it hurt to humor him?") the Tories catered to the whims of the rural Britons who don't like seeing someone wearing a hijab on High Street. The GOP can't cross Trumpists; the Tories can't cross Brexiteers.

In a democracy, ideally the electorate looks at how a party intends to govern, they look at how they have governed in the past and they make a reasoned decision based on that evidence. 

Britain is supposed to avoid this sort of farcical incompetence, but Brexit forced them to "make a cheese submarine." In America, the "thermostatic elections" means that we are about to give a party that has manifestly no idea how to govern and no real desire to learn how to govern control of at least the lower house of our legislature. To the degree that they have ideas, they are unpopular and awful (cutting Social Security and Medicare). Once in power, they will cut off aid to Ukraine and force a sovereign debt crisis. And it just won't matter.

To the degree that "conservatism" consisted of ideas about economic "freedom" and empowering the entrepreneurial class...OK, it was mostly bullshit, but it was coherent bullshit. 

Now "conservatism" is no more than some angry old White Dude and his angrier wife standing in the middle of the road screaming at his imagined enemies while he lights the world on fire around him.

Ugh.

The Future Of The Anti-Trump Coalition

 Greg Sargent has a nice rundown of how the anti-Trump majority that showed up in 2018 ad 2020 could be fraying. My hope was that the inroads that Democrats made in the suburbs could result in a near-term permanent majority, as those voters tend to vote. Even with the absence of Trump on the ballot, the batshit insanity of the GOP would - I hoped - cement them into the Democratic column. Gas prices, inflation and crime - the Unholy Trinity that gave us Reagan - imperils that.

There's still a hope that Dobbs has locked in an anti-GOP - as opposed to anti-Trump - majority. However, I just don't know. Polling seems pretty much trash these days, so we will find out on Election Day.

What The Hell?

 Two stories on different sides of the Atlantic. 

British pilots are helping China understand Western military aircraft.

Retired American officers are helping Saudi Arabia and other despots.

Some of this is the obvious revolving door between government service and lucrative "consulting" gigs that I guess make sense as a de facto pay day for serving your country.

The problem is that the world appears to be realigning. China, certainly, is not a friendly power. Especially with Xi Xinping's consolidation of power into his own hands and not that of the party. Saudi Arabia is just a toxic force in the world right now. 

We are seeing why Western militaries are superior to Despotic militaries in the way a newly democratic Ukraine with Western aid has been able to hold off an force back Russia. You can see why despots would want to tap into that knowledge, but also why the US would want to keep that knowledge to themselves. 

So, I'm Worried

 Anand Giriharadas has a piece on how to counteract the politics of fascism. It's really good and I agree with most of it.

However, it's a little late for it now. The Republicans have a compelling "story."  Crime and inflation. A lot of it is racist, especially the crime stuff. But crime is a real problem. Inflation is not Biden's fault, as it's a global phenomenon, and inflation in the US is better than most places.

But gas prices are what they are. More concerning is the narrative about crime, because it activates the fear based part of the brain. Crime is actually down a bit (at least murder is) but it feels up and that's more important than facts. This also feeds into the "defund the police" label that Republicans have hung around elected Democrats, with an assist from some activist groups.

Anyway, Democrats need to hold the Senate and they may still do so, because Republicans have nominated a bunch of lunatics. But I had hope for a hidden Blue Wave from Dobbs, and I don't think that's happening anymore.

The Party Against Ideas

 Decent piece by Peter Wehner about how the GOP went from being a Party of Ideas (most of them were evil or bullshit or both, but I guess they were ideas) to being a party cynically interested in power for power's sake. Paul Campos has a nice take on it, too.

This, ultimately, is Trump's legacy on American politics. He has stripped whatever moral mooring technically existed in that party, piled them on the Capitol steps and lit them on fire.

I do not believe that Trumpism represents a majority position in America, but the nature of our party system means that we could soon be handing control of the House and important state level positions to people who have zero scruples about ending real democracy in this country. 

Starkly amoral to the point of being actively immoral, and that is at best.

We Need To Talk About Tech Bros

 Yglesias looks at Elon Musk's potential takeover of Twitter, in light of his currently cozy relationship with China. More broadly, there are two issues here. Yglesias can run you through the way China extrudes its censorship regime into the West, via its market dominance. If you want to do business in China, you have to abide by their twisted version of the "truth" regarding Hong Kong, Xinxiang, Tibet and Taiwan. 

The specific malfeasance of China is an important discussion to have. Unlike Russia, China is an international illiberal force with real economic clout. Russia's behavior could largely be ignored, because Russia is poor and poorly governed. China is powerful and the tools we can bring to bear on China are few and far between compared to Russia.

However, we should probably also examine the political culture of Silicon Valley, too.

Thirty years ago, Benjamin Barber wrote Jihad vs McWorld, in which he argued that both rising ethnic tribalism and global capitalism were at best indifferent to liberal democracy and at worst actively hostile to it. The idea that free markets make free people has always been mostly bullshit. Among other things, there really is no such thing as a "free" market at any scale. Once you get beyond a barter economy, markets are dramatically influenced by all sorts of government policies. Silicon Valley, for instance, was created due to its close proximity to major research universities that get massive Federal grants and having better weather than Boston.

Because at most of the Tech entrepreneurs have some engineering background, they tend to be deficient in Humanities education. They took coding classes and got MBAs; they didn't study civics. As a result you get extreme examples like Peter Thiel, who is quite literally funding candidates to end liberal democracy. For people like Thiel, democracy means listening to the plebs, and he has a haughty disdain for those plebs, unless he can exploit their racial and economic insecurities to make an end run at electoral democracy.

Musk isn't Thiel, but there is something fundamentally wrong with this guy. He's just a profoundly strange guy who has billions of dollars. As we saw with Trump, having a lot of money and a damaged or broken psyche is a really bad combination. The sort of checks on poor behavior are erased as they are protected by their great wealth. Because we venerate wealth, we imbue people like Trump or Thiel or Musk with some sort of Social Darwinian excellence that they simply don't possess.

I'm not opposed to people being rewarded for excellence. I do wonder how much people like Gates, Bezos and Musk benefit from a sort of soft monopolistic model, but they do produce things that people want and they can reap those benefits.

I am opposed to the very idea of a billionaire class of supposed betters.

Sinclair Lewis wrote that if fascism came to America it would be wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible. Apparently it will also be funded venture capitalists and Tech Bros.

Why The Soviet Union Fell

 There were myriad reasons: a dysfunctional economy certainly tops the list. One other reason it collapsed - both in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union proper - was because Marxist-Leninist doctrine did not account for ethnicity. Various ethnic groups (especially the Baltic states but it included groups like Ukrainians) decided they no longer wanted to live under Moscow's Rule. Yeltsin, to his credit, mostly let them go. When he didn't in Chechnya, the results were awful.

Putin is not a Marxist-Leninist. He's a Blood and Soil nationalist. That ideology, too, does not allow for ethnic diversity within a broader Russian Federation. Apparently, today in Russia, Muslim Tajiks were berated by an officer who impugned Allah. Three of them opened fire, killing 29 soldiers. Given that the bulk of the newly mobilized Russian soldiers are from the ethnic periphery of Russia, this sort of thing could become common. Putin's army of "mobiks" could consume itself in ethnic conflict.

Correcting the historical understanding of America's racist past is important for any number of reasons. Those forces in America who think we can't handle that knowledge are exactly like these bigoted Russian soldiers who are going to be blindsided when they mass of people they are supposed to rule over decide that they have had quite enough bullshit.

Endemic Covid

 Paul Campos has a rundown on the current state of endemic Covid. Biden took some shit for saying that the pandemic is over, but...the pandemic IS over. We are now in endemic Covid. It's everywhere and it's still pretty lethal...if you're unvaccinated.

I've had my third booster - the Omicron, bivalent booster - a few weeks ago. Kind of like how I'm getting my annual flu shot in a week or two. But basically, if you're over 65 and haven't been vaccinated at all, well, I don't know what to say. Your risk of dying of Covid is as great as ALL forms of mortality for those between ages 55-64 combined. Covid is circulating around and it could very well kill you. If you're under 65 and double (or triple) boosted you're not going to die of Covid, except in very rare circumstances. 

Even though my own experience with Covid was fraught, I really don't focus much on it anymore. I do wonder, though, with about 100,000 excess deaths a year mostly concentrated in the elderly, what impact this will have on American society. I'm assuming, perhaps wrongly, that these deaths are concentrated among those over 65 and those who lean Right or Far Right. Will that have an impact on electoral politics? The long term prospects for Social Security and Medicare?

It feels like a question no one really wants to answer: What are the practical implications of having 100,000-150,000 additional dead Americans every year?

Chickens, Roosting

 Brexit was always a terrible idea. It was a transparently stupid idea when it was proposed. It was a transparently stupid idea to leave up to a referendum. It was a stupid idea that brought down David Cameron, Teresa May and Boris Johnson and is now going to bring down Liz Truss. Truss is a terrible person, an opportunist who lacks the policy chops of most PMs. Her and Kwarteng's ideas were laughably bad, a remix of supply side nonsense that never works, except in right wing fever dreams.

Brexit's appeal to baser emotions are exactly why populism is "bad" and why we should buffer popular whims through elected representatives. Britain has historically been really good at moderating those popular whims and so the Brexit referendum has upended that dynamic.

The thing is, Brexit or January 6th should be the end of Conservative/Republican rule for a generation, the way the Depression ended Republican rule for a generation in America.

Yet, the Conservatives will hang on for a while and Republicans seem poised to enjoy a midterm election defined by global inflation and gas prices.

More Musky Awfulness

 Elon Musk has recently advocated for positions that tilt heavily towards Russia and China. He's suggested a "peace plan" for Ukraine that is basically Putin's wish list, thrown out there at a time when Ukraine looks to be turning the tide - perhaps for good. He then advocated for Taiwan to be returned to Chinese rule. Not great, Bob!

Now, we have reports of the Starlink satellite terminals that Musk ostentatiously "donated" to Ukraine not working as Ukrainian forces advance. This was followed up by Musk now claiming that he - the world's richest man - can no longer afford to fund Urkaine's Starlink "subscription." 

I don't know a ton about Starlink, but it seems like a commercial monthly fee is around $60 and Musk wants to charge the Pentagon $4500 a month. There MIGHT be some sort of reason why military bandwidth for Starlink is greater than other applications, but charging 75 times as much seems like price gauging. Or war profiteering, though Musk is likely protected by the fact that the United States is not at war.

Musk was a creature of apartheid - a democracy in form but not in practice. His family's wealth came from emerald mines that exploited African labor, and while he's never overtly embraced apartheid, there is a clear subculture of TechBros who embrace a post-democratic future. A form of stateless techno-anarchy where rich dudes like them are unfettered by the whims of little people. Peter Thiel is the cartoonishly evil version of this, but Musk is demonstrating that he's authoritarian-adjacent, too.

All of this is to perhaps argue that 
A) having private companies involved in national security without some form of restraint is highly problematic
B) billionaires suck

Musk strikes me as a guy who shares with Trump a fundamental brokenness as a human being that has been sheltered and excused because he has known nothing but wealth his whole life.

Oh, and the DoD should just seize the Starlink system and take it over.

UPDATE: I mean...Jesus.

America's First Female President

 ...was Nancy Pelosi on January 6th.

What an absolute unit, and one of the finest Speakers in the long history of the House.

Brain Worms

 It is not a secret that the Right in this country has embarked upon a quest to elevate ignorance and bigotry as a form of political purity. Trumpism is a lot of things, but it's mostly about mean spirited stupidity.

Not to engage in whataboutism, but there is a similar problem on the Left. Jon Chait has been cataloguing the problem of leftist intolerance and quasi-authoritarianism and he demonstrates the negative impact of this when it comes to climate policy. Reading what the Climate-Justice movement wants to do about climate is just mind-numbingly stupid. 

As Chait notes, they start from a legitimate position: negative environmental impacts have the greatest effect on poorer communities, which are usually minority communities. The natural solution is to direct resources to those communities and make sure that the typically powerless communities have a say...but not a veto. NIMBYism is not a strictly middle class phenomenon. 

Instead, we get a movement whose ultimate goal is the overthrow of neoliberal capitalism, and they then squeeze other ideas through a climate lens. The most aggravating aspect of the "climate emergency" is how half-assed the purported climate groups are in looking for solutions. If you want to be absolutely certain that we address the presence of carbon in the atmosphere, then you HAVE to look at nuclear and direct air carbon capture. You HAVE to look at geothermal, as well as solar and wind. Instead, climate-justice groups oppose these because a large corporation would be necessary to build nuclear and geothermal plants and if direct air capture ever became feasible, it would lessen the need to destroy capitalism.

More fundamentally, there is a brain worm in certain left wing circles that symbolism - whether language or action - is more important than institutions. Glibly, this is what happens when you let English majors address social concerns. You get a ten page position paper on the oppression of pronouns but you don't set up an office in the Department of Health and Human Services to guide and counsel transgender people. If someone wants to be called "they" I do my best to accommodate them, because I don't want to be an asshole, but that doesn't do shit to change how Trans people are treated. In fact, if anything, it focuses the outrage of the Right.

During the Civil Rights Movement, there was a lot of agita over whether to use the word "Negro," "Black," "Afro-American," or "African-American." But ultimately, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were more important in elevating the status of Blacks in the South and across the country and current efforts to erase those laws are more important than whether one says "black," "Black" or "Person of Color." Still, there seems to be a weird fascination that changing language will change institutions. I haven't seen the evidence from history to suggest that's true.

The only example I can see is that calling yourself a climate-justice group means that you actually ignore climate.

Yeah, I Was Right

 A couple of years back, I had a good natured argument with a student about bitcoin and Elon Musk. I was right about cryptocurrency being a classic bubble with no underlying value.

I was also right about Elon Musk being a bit of a fraud and definitely not the New Tech Jesus.

Or maybe he IS the New Tech Jesus, because that community of tech bros is freaking weird AF.

I'm Concerned

 I've been more sanguine than most about Democratic chances in the midterm. I think Dobbs and January 6th have legs and Republicans have nominated some awful candidates. I'm a little worried that fatigue has set in among Democratic voters, but I do think they will show up. My worry is that parties tend to know more than public polling lets on. 

What worries me is that high profile Republicans are actively stumping for Herschel Walker. This guy is literally brain damaged and massive dumpster fire of a human being. He's awful. He's a low cost way for them to signal that they actually have principles. "I can no longer support Mr. Walker in his campaign, because he's a massive hypocrite when it comes to the sanctity of the unborn." 

Instead, they are rushing to his aid. Maybe this is because they know they are losing elsewhere and Georgia remains close. I think they've given up on Arizona, for instance, and New Hampshire. But it sure looks like Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida are close races that they need to defend, and they are focusing on Walker? Are they seeing that those races are in the bag? 

Maybe they just suck at politics. Rick Scott burned through the NSCC's money like he was stealing from Medicare. Maybe this is just the millionth iteration of Cleek's Law and "pwning the libs." 

Still, if they were rallying around JD Vance or Ron Johnson, that would make me more sanguine that they were truly on the defensive.

Geothermal Future

 Yglesias looks at geothermal power. He uses the example of Iceland, but acknowledges that Iceland is unique because the geothermal source is pretty close to the surface - in some cases it's on the surface. The Blue Lagoon he mentions is the byproduct of a geothermal power plant that is repurposed as a spa.

The best places for geothermal are therefore the places closest to the liquid hot magma and most of these are out west.  As Yglesias notes, most land out west is owned by the Federal government which should make it easier to tap into, but doesn't because we don't privilege the permitting of geothermal wells on public lands, the way we do fossil fuels. Nevada, California, Arizona and Colorado are growing states with growing energy needs (that are being stressed by the collapse of water flow in the Colorado River) who could reinvent their electricity needs with geothermal energy. There are even hot spots on the Louisiana/Arkansas border that could create good green energy jobs in states that don't seem to give a rats ass about climate change.

There are some "warm" spots on the east coast, including near Pittsburgh, eastern Maine and a pocket on the Iowa/Illinois border. Imagine being able to power the electrical grid of Pittsburgh, Boston and Chicago with renewable geothermal energy that emits no carbon. There's even a warm spot between Atlanta and Charleston, if you're so inclined.

Solar and wind are cheap and clean, but they ultimately are constrained by the weather and storage capabilities. Geothermal is not. I've seen first hand what it looks like in tiny Iceland, and it should be a bigger part of our conversation about carbon neutral power.

This Is What Escalation Looks Like

 Russia launched a series of missile attacks on Ukrainian cities in response to the partial destruction of the Kerch Bridge and in the face of their ongoing problems near Kherson and in Luhansk. In the "every accusation is a confession" style of rhetoric, Russia claimed that the attack on the critical infrastructure of the bridge was "terrorism." It is not. What Russia did in attacking population centers is close to terrorism, if not terrorism itself. It was designed to frighten Ukrainians and simply exert the sort of mindless bloodlust that is for domestic consumption in Russia. 

Putin's biggest worry - as it is very every autocrat - is a palace coup. There are people worse than him in the wings demanding more and more Ukrainian blood. This is for them. This is "looking strong" by bullying population centers.

What we know from countless previous examples is that this will not have an impact on the battlefield. If anything, it will stiffen Ukrainian resolve. However, Russia does not have an endless supply of these rockets. This is also the way escalation works without crossing the nuclear threshold. 

Putin is simultaneously a monster and not the worst person in Russia. Let that sink in.

Operational Pause

 Ukrainian gains in the Kherson and Luhansk oblasts have slowed considerably. The partial destruction of the Kerch bridge and subsequent HIMARs attacks on Russian rail hubs will have immediate and long term effects on Russia's ability to supply its troops in the Kherson area - which seems to be its main focal point of strength, along with the Donetsk area.

Ukraine has been pretty good about not driving its troops into exhaustion. They will exploit Russian collapses as they have in Kherson and Kharkov oblasts, but they won't degrade their force by pushing their endurance beyond the breaking point.

However, November is coming, and Ukraine would ideally like one more major push that shows real territorial gains. The isolation of Kherson would suggest that is the likely theater, but the destruction of the Kerch bridge could lead to an assault through Zaporizhia oblast towards Melitopol or Mariupol. While Ukraine has been cautious about its troop effectiveness, Russia seems to be more profligate with their troops - hence the mobilization. I simply can't imagine there are abundant Russian troops manning a line from the Dnipro river to Donetsk.  

They're Just Better At This

 Ukraine has (most likely) blown up the bridge that connect Crimea with Russia. The blast will badly impede Russian supply lines to their forces around Kherson. I've been waiting for an attack towards Mariupol for weeks, and this could be a precursor.

There's an old saw that amateur generals talk about tactics and professional soldiers talk about logistics. Ukraine has been so much better at targeting Russian logistics and "shaping the battlefield" than Russia. In fact, Russia responded to this by lobbing shells into civilian population centers. That's been their MO, whether out of malice or because they suck at targeting. The result of attacks on civilian centers has almost always been to stiffen resolve against the aggressors.

Ukraine has been pressing Russian forces near Kherson, they've blown up most bridges over the Dnipro River to isolate those forces. Now, they've added another bottleneck to Russian supply lines.

Nukes

 I am confident but not certain that Putin will not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. My confidence can be largely summarized in this piece by Timothy Snyder. "War is politics by other means," means that war must have a political goal. As Snyder points out, nuclear powers have fought and lost wars since 1950 without resorting the nuclear weapons. Soviet defeat in Afghanistan arguably led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet they still did not use nukes. 

Ukraine will not be invading Russia. They might launch raids at supply depots and communications hubs, but Ukrainian troops will not be invading and occupying Russia territory. Therefore, the fundamental purpose of nuclear weapons - deterrence against the destruction of the state - will not be engaged. 

However, Putin's decision making has been flawed, and I can't say with complete certainty that he won't make a catastrophic decision. It just looks really, really unlikely.

I Mean, Sure

 The Department of Justice believes that Trump is still retaining documents. Of course he is.

Can we file charges against this malevolent fuck?

Is It On?

 Could be nothing, but one of the most consistent sources for the conduct of the war in Ukraine has been Russian military bloggers or milblogs. They've been the ones accurately commentating on the weakness of Russian troops and the setbacks they are seeing in Ukraine. Obviously, official Russian channels haven't provided this and Ukraine wants some level of operational security to shroud what they are doing.

Anyway, the Russian milblogs are predicting a strike towards Melitopol through Zaporizhzia Oblast. Having mauled Russia on Ukraine's left and right flanks, in Luhansk/Kharkiv and Kherson, attacking the Russian center and the "land bridge" between Russian occupied Donetsk and Crimea would seem to be a question of whether Ukraine had enough men and resources, not strategic efficacy.

Worth keeping an eye on.

Now THIS Is Scary

 I remain convinced but not certain that Vladimir Putin will not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. I have a hunch China might be letting him know that's a dealbreaker. We know Kazakhstan has already broken with him and he's running out of friends.

Obviously, one outcome we've all probably hoped for (OK, not Tucker Carlson) is that Putin gets overthrown. The idea of a liberal regime taking over from Putin, or even a military-backed technocratic coup, is pretty damned remote. If anyone removes Putin by force, it will be these crazy-assed lunatics.

There are worse people in Russia than Putin, at least in part because Putin empowered some pretty awful people with pretty awful ideas. Kind of like Trump did here, Putin loosed the worst impulses of his country. At this point, the best we can hope for is Russia collapsing into civil war, and even that is mildly terrible.

"Of Boys And Men"

 Yglesias takes a run at Richard Reeve's new book "Of Boys and Men." I had previously read David Brooks' review of it. As both a teacher and a father of boys, this has been a concern of mine. It does tend to get bogged down in culture war trench warfare, which limits how we deal with, though it's interesting that my feminist wife is also very concerned about it - again a teacher and a mother of boys.

One thing Yglesias can always be relied in to do is lean on his previously held beliefs. In this case, he makes the argument - which I do believe is sound - that we shouldn't shy from universal solutions. This has always been a blindspot of the left, and it applies in this instance, even if the left isn't engaged on this issue. Yes, we should help address economic and environmental racism. But if we address economic equality and environmental degradation in general, we will disproportionately help Black and Brown communities. Universal pre-K will help those communities, too.

There are solutions to "the boy problem" that would be helpful, like universal pre-K, but of course, that's expensive. You get pushback from women's advocates who rightly note that men are disproportionately represented in the halls of power and business. That's not the issue. The issue is that male children of non-elites are really struggling, and we see that show up in really bad social outcomes. Young men will always be a disproportionate share of the criminal element in a society, because of the nature of being young men. They are literally wired to take bigger risks. Addressing this gap among boys in non-college educated households is an important societal task.

The fact is that the culture war crap makes this so much harder to solve. Feminists are right that "men" are not a disadvantaged group; we are talking about a sub-group of men. Conservatives will trace this to a "war on boys" which is largely bullshit. There isn't a war on boys, it's just that their needs are being ignored to death. The solutions, like universal pre-K, won't jazz conservatives who hate the state doing anything for the poor.

There's another aspect of this, though, that is also tied into a larger framework. 

Jobs can suck.

Personally, I mostly love my job, but it's an avocation, a career. I enjoy a certain respect in my work. I have rarely "enjoyed" the McJobs of my youth. We are seeing this dynamic in the quiet quitting phenomenon and the post-Covid job dynamics. 

People don't want to work shitty jobs for low pay and low respect. This can be especially acute for men, whose pride can mess them up. Yeah, men can sometimes feel like they are owed things that they aren't owed. Yeah, this leads to toxic masculinity. However, simply raising pay won't completely bridge this gap. In one way, universal health care would make a huge difference here. By levelling one set of inputs and outcomes, it would take the onus away from low-paying, poor-benefit jobs. It would be insufficient, but it would also help outcomes among men.

There was a time when manual labor had a prestige place in American values. Now, unskilled manual labor is a ticket to poor health and poor status. Certain manual skilled jobs retain some of that prestige (plumbers, electricians, some IT work) but those jobs aren't open to 19 year olds. If your options are stay at home, get high and play video games or work at McDonalds for minimum wage...whose to say option one doesn't make some sort of sense.

America has seen a decline in social mobility relative to Europe. Is that because vocational education and vocational jobs are not frowned upon?

My sons are the product of a "social elite" household of two college and post-graduate degree holders. The system actually should work really well for them. Colleges want young men! Hopefully our youngest will benefit by being a boy who's good at school, but even our eldest - who is smart, but not "good at school" - is having a productive college experience. In part, that was because when he struggled in school, we had resources to bring to bear to help him.

Not every boy can say the same, and that is having a negative effect on our country.

Art And The Artist

 Paul Campos examines the role the artist's personal qualities should or should not effect our appreciation of their art.

As we've learned just how awful most celebrity geniuses are, it's tough to separate our enjoyment of art produced by terrible people, if we determine that enjoying their art is an endorsement of their person.

I guess that always struck me as absurd. When an artist creates art and the art is "finished" and presented to the world, it ceases to truly belong to the artist (beyond copyright laws or legal possession). An artist does not control the reaction to their art, no doubt they sometimes wish they could. 

This comes up all the time with writers who write things that the reader assumes are autobiographical. That isn't always what a writer is doing. Yes, they may mine personal experiences or feelings for material, but writing fiction is about...fiction.

I like Woody Allen films. I like Roman Polanski's Chinatown. I like Eric Clapton's music. I do not personally like any of those three artists. That's OK. Enjoying a Miramax film does not mean endorsing Harvey Weinstein's sexual predations.

And frankly, it's weird that people think so.

Will It Matter?

 The Daily Beast broke the story that GOP Senate candidate (!) Herschel Walker paid for a woman's abortion. Subsequently, his son, Christian - who is his own brand of crazy - accused his father or threatening violence against him and his mother.

Walker was never a bright guy, but he shows signs of cognitive decline traced, perhaps, to brain injury. Listening to him talk, there is no way an objective person could think he deserved to represent a state 10,500,000 in Senate. The fact that the Georgia GOP landed on someone who seems literally brain damaged, has shown signs of domestic violence and is a massive hypocrite on the abortion issue is taking their fealty to Trump a little too far.

Back in 2016, a colleague wandered into my office and asked, "Can he really win?" I said, "He's the candidate of one of the two major parties, so it's possible, but he's not going to." Yeah. So, we have a series of scandals that would sink a candidate in any reasonable form of objective electioneering. Yet Walker still has a chance.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, Fetterman is fronting a story about Mehmet Oz killing beagles as part of a medical experiment that was cited for animal cruelty. Again, this should sink Oz's campaign. 

If Georgia or Pennsylvania were Mississippi, I would shake my head and acknowledge that there is simply no way for a Democrat to win. But Georgia is a swing state and Pennsylvania shades blue. But I can't sit here and say that Walker and Oz will lose. That's a mind blowing dysfunction in American democracy.

Normietown

 Yglesias makes a case for a more robust DNA database and expanded use of facial recognition software to reduce recidivism. He engages in a little bit of Leftist-Punching, but I think it's warranted. 

Coming out of the murder of George Floyd and the protest movement it spawned, we got the lamentable "Defund the Police" messaging debacle. Police were the problem, because they included not only Derek Chauvin but the officers who stood there and watched Floyd die. I get why "You can't reform this" trended. There are real problems in the police "Warrior Culture". Protect and serve became dominate and occupy.

I will always remember what Deroy McKesson told our students: that Black Lives Matter also refers to the high number of Black murder victims whose families never see justice. If you're Black and get murdered, the police don't devote a ton of resources. This leads to the problem of Black and Brown communities being simultaneously over- and under-policed. 

What Yglesias and others are arguing for would be to short circuit the recidivism cycle by storing DNA of anyone every arrested. Additionally, you could make better use of monitoring devices like ankle monitors to keep minor offenders out of prison. The idea is that too often, if you're a petty criminal, you can be reasonably certain you'll escape punishment. The police simply can't devote resources into every car broken into.

To bring my own experiences into it: we have a Drug and Alcohol rule here at our school. If you get caught drinking or doing (light) drugs, you will get suspended, including simply being in the same room with someone doing drugs or drinking. However, after your suspension you get another chance, but you know that if you're ever even in the same room as someone drinking, you lose your spot here. There is a certain forgiveness in this system, but also it creates a powerful check on future bad behavior. In fact, peers help keep peers in line, once they know they have their "strike."

Since most criminals statistically are young men, creating an accountability measure - like a DNA database or ankle monitors - that de-incentivizes doing more crimes while keeping them out of prison, seems like a no-brainer. However, the All Cops Are Bastards crowd is clearly not going to go along with that.

This is where the Lefty Punching and the appeals to living in Normietown are accurate. People worry about crime, and when they worry about crime, they are more likely to elect reactionary authoritarian figures. The GOP is running on crime, because crime did spike in 2020 (Who was president then? Doesn't matter.). While the murder rate is falling, that's from its 2020-21 peak and it's still higher than 2019. If you want to prevent a Trump or DeSantis victory in 2024, you have to tackle crime and inflation. 

In a functioning world, there is a bipartisan crime bill that creates a national DNA database and a robust ankle monitoring system for non-violent criminals (especially juvenile offenders). The DNA database (and perhaps some increased facial recognition software) is your "tough on crime" bit and the ankle monitoring addresses the mass incarceration concerns.

Too bad we don't live in a functioning world.

Kherson

 Rumors swirl about a possible Ukrainian breakthrough near Kherson. Like Liman, Kherson was increasingly a trap, but one that Putin wouldn't let them escape. While it does appear that Russian forces finally abandoned Liman, there's no telling how many troops successfully retreated to Kremmina. Russia is bleeding men - which is why they are rushing conscripts to the front - and equipment - which they cannot replace. 

Putin and Russian commanders elected not to reinforce the northeastern sector after the successful Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive. They continued to prioritize Kherson. By all accounts, Kherson has been a meatgrinder for both sides. Also by all accounts, Russia is running out of men faster than Ukraine is. Additionally, we have reports of Russian soldiers asking for air support...on social media. Totally normal.

If we are seeing a collapse of Russian forces on the west bank of Dnipro River, that could cause a cascading series of failures right into the streets of Kherson itself. 

Of course, as Josh Marshall points out, a defeated, humiliated Putin and Russia is imminently more dangerous. Russia does one thing well: rocketry and nuclear weapons. Is there anyone in the Kremlin who can restrain Putin from using them?

Remember the Martha's Vineyard Story?

 Now we know who "Perla" is: Perla Huerta. She was a former Army Counterintelligence "agent" whatever that means.

The worry, if you're Charlie Crist, is that Ron DeSantis will achieve a normal level of competence after Ian - exactly the sort of normal competency that Trump failed to find during the pandemic. He can use this to win re-election. Of course, he's already started talking about how Floridians can shoot looters if they want. I'm sure George Zimmerman has an erection right now.

Of course, if Crist is smart, any slip ups in Florida's response, should be met with the question: Where's that $12,000,000 you used to ship migrants out of Texas? 

DeSantis has been called the smart, under control Trump. But playing Trump's music requires you to be reckless, vain and violent. There is also some evidence that he's siphoning donations to an organization headed by his wife. Amazing, if true.

Florida is a fucking cesspool, and DeSantis is a perfect representation of the Florida GOP.  But defeating him should be a priority of Democrats.

Tua Tagovailoa

 Last Sunday, Miami Dolphins Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered a concussion. I'm not a neurologist; I wasn't there; I saw it on television after the fact. But that was a concussion. He hit his head. Stood up and shook the "cobwebs" out of his head, took a few steps and stumbled forward. Looking at that, it was plainly obvious that he had a concussion.

The Dolphins medical staff let him back in the game after passing a concussion protocol.

Then, four days later, he suffered another concussion in a Thursday night game that was so severe he entered "fencer's pose" where his fingers curled up and his arms went rigid. It was scary and disturbing to see. After going to the hospital, he was released and flew back to Miami with his team.

The NFL Players Association is furious, as are outside watchers. What we know about concussions has exploded in the past few years. We know how dangerous accumulated concussions can be. We know how repeated concussions - especially those close together - can create long lasting cognitive and psychological issues. Junior Seau killed himself because of brain damage he received playing football.

The defense of "he passed the protocols" isn't a defense; it's an indictment of the protocols.

The NFL better get its shit together before someone dies on the field.