Ukrainian IT War

 From TRMS 2022 03 30

Before the war, Ukraine had a bureaucratic agency called the Ministry of Digital Transformation. It supported a government-run app that helped people do their business with the government, such things as paying traffic fines and such. At the start of the war, additional functions were added such as air raid alerts and all-clear notifications, As the war has progressed, more stuff has been added. People can report Russian troop positions, evidence of war crimes, make appointments to donate blood. It is now an essential element of the defense effort. Because the DIA app had robust safeguards built in from the beginning it has proven to be a well-secured place for the gathering of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence).

Everyone overestimated the capabilities of the Russian cyber-offense. Ukraine has been able to defend itself well from that and even go on the cyber-offensive itself. They had some good minds from the West helping them as the threat of war grew and now the best minds are helping as well. Furthermore, the Russians made the mistake of not attacking internet infrastructure initially because they thought they would quickly be using it themselves. That gave Ukraine time to harden their capabilities against future attacks.

The MDT was key is getting Elon Musk to provide Starlink terminals so internet access was available despite loss of infrastructure. It has also been a channel for funding from the cryptocurrency world that has been very beneficial for the purchase of needed weapons and supplies.

Ecash

 Could eCash become a thing? [How will the system avoid a counterfeiting problem?]  

Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, a former ironworker who represents part of Boston and its southern suburbs, isn’t soft on crime, but he doesn’t like the idea of banks and the government being able to track every transaction a person makes.

On Monday, Lynch introduced a bill directing the Department of the Treasury, rather than the Federal Reserve, to develop and experiment with issuing digital dollar technologies “that replicate the privacy-respecting features of physical cash.” The bill is called the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act, or Ecash.

Lynch’s idea is for the Treasury to issue cards that have funds stored on them, as with the electronic benefits transfer cards the government issues for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other benefits. The difference is that transactions on those benefit cards are processed through the banking system. Transactions on the proposed new Treasury cards would be strictly peer to peer, like cash. Funds could also be uploaded onto phones or other hardware.

Presumably, chips on the cards or phones would communicate with chips on other cards or phones or on point-of-sale devices to deliver or receive funds between them. The cards or phones could receive money from one another or be reloaded from bank accounts or with cash.

Pandemic Fatigue

It's getting tiring. 

I wondered how long I would gaze with mistrust at other people, wondering if they were a source of germs (the coronavirus, or the run-of-the-mill colds that still keep my children out of school until PCR results return). I wondered when this would all be over, and I worried that the answer was never. I wondered how long it would be before I felt less angry.

My sister and I long for normalcy, but we see our elderly and immune-compromised father regularly. My sister’s wife has a chronic illness, and our preschoolers are unvaccinated. We are more Covid cautious than some, and less cautious than others. How easy it is to feel that people who are not just like us are paranoid on the one hand or reckless on the other.

Such characterizations might briefly soothe the hurts that we have all accumulated: the casual eugenics present in the dismissals of deaths of people with pre-existing conditions; the reckless sexism present in the indifference to the availability of in-person school; the cruel uncompensated loss of paychecks, customers and clients; the intimate-partner violence and substance abuse that has swelled behind closed doors; the crushing loneliness that comes from working behind a mask or seeing few people outside of your home. People have split themselves into warring factions over measures like mask mandates and school closures, with each side minimizing the harms about which the other is concerned. Many of us feel abandoned.

I have observed the wreckage of the past 25 months. Women have asked me, with terrifying urgency, how they can continue to live their lives entirely in their homes when a violent family member renders the home unsafe. I have watched people turn toward substances to ease the pressures of the pandemic, and then enter rehab reluctantly or hopefully; I have listened to their family members and friends recount relapses, the shame and fear making their words all but inaudible.

Another Path to Fusion Energy

 HB11 Energy has demonstrated the ability to create nuclear fusion by bombarding a boron target with relativistic-speed protons. The reaction creates alpha-particles rather than heat. These can then be directly converted to electricity without steam turbines. The gain comes when one proton triggers the conversion of Boron-11 into 3 energetic alpha-particles. When these strike the container, a current is produced as the alphas pick up electrons. Natural boron is 80% B-11.

HB11 is approaching nuclear fusion from an entirely new angle, using high power, high precision lasers instead of hundred-million-degree temperatures to start the reaction. Its first demo has produced 10 times more fusion reactions than expected, and the company says it's now "the only commercial entity to achieve fusion so far," making it "the global frontrunner in the race to commercialize the holy grail of clean energy."

Hydrogen-boron fusion doesn't create heat, it merely creates "naked" helium atoms, or alpha particles, which are missing electrons and thus positively charged. HB11 plans to simply collect that charge to create energy, rather than needing to superheat steam and drive lossy turbines. No nuclear waste is created.

"The demonstration of fusion reactions alone is incredibly exciting," said McKenzie in a press release. "But on top of this, the unexpectedly high number of reactions additionally gives us important information about how to optimize our technology to further increase the fusion energy we can create."

"HB11 Energy’s research demonstrated that its hydrogen-boron energy technology is now four orders of magnitude away from achieving net energy gain when catalyzed by a laser," reads the press release. "This is many orders of magnitude higher than those reported by any other fusion company, most of which have not generated any reaction despite billions of dollars invested in the field. The results show great potential for clean energy generation: hydrogen-boron reactions use fuels that are safe and abundant, don’t create neutrons in the primary reaction so cause insignificant amounts of short-lived waste, and can provide large-scale power for base-load grid electricity or hydrogen generation."

Taxing Billionaires

It's a neat trick. Pay taxes now and you'll get credits later.

The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives Congress “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes.” Wealth is not income, so courts have found that straight-ahead wealth taxes are unconstitutional.

Biden’s plan gets around that large obstacle by taxing billionaires on the increase in their wealth. That gain, the administration argues, can be considered income: If your horse farm or your Renoir painting doubles in value, that increase can be thought of as income — just like wages from flipping burgers — even if you don’t realize the gain by selling.

Biden included the billionaire tax proposal on Monday as part of his budget plan for the fiscal year beginning in October. The proposal includes a minimum tax of at least 20 percent on the income of American households worth more than $100 million. The tax would apply only to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of households, with more than half of its proceeds coming from billionaires, the budget plan says.

Eric Zwick, an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, said the billionaire tax is a little bit like a conventional capital gains tax, except with the tax paid over time based on the best estimate of the value of the assets each year. That would make it like a withholding system, with taxpayers paying ahead of time for a tax that will eventually come due. As it is now, a lot of capital gains don’t get taxed because heirs don’t have to pay tax on the assets’ increase in value from when they were bought to when they were passed down.

There are lots of complications, though, including the difficulty of measuring the value of illiquid assets (like horse farms). Taxes on gains in illiquid assets would not be assessed annually — although that leads to other complications. Zwick said, “There are other ways to raise this that seem simpler,” such as increasing existing tax rates and closing loopholes.

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Retro Internet

Plain text is making a comeback on the internet. Sometimes it pays to keep it simple.

Between the pop-ups, the autoplaying videos, the cookie banners, the incessant calls for sign-ups, the coupon offers, the “Don’t forget to subscribe!” reminders on top of the other “Don’t forget to subscribe!” reminders, the in-line ads slowing the page down, the slew of trackers also slowing the page down … you get the idea. For lots of reasons, some good and some bad, much of the internet has become totally unusable.

like something out of the 1970s, a wall of monospaced plain text with ASCII-art boxes surrounding real-time scores for all the professional sports games happening right now. It has no images, no pop-ups, no trackers. It loads practically instantly, even on a bad connection. I’ve been refreshing it obsessively the last few weeks, through the end of the NBA seasons and the beginning of March Madness. Not only is it a useful site for sports fans, but it feels like a harbinger of things to come.

Joe Manchin's Real Agenda

He wants to keep the coal power plant that buys its coal from his private company open.

The Grant Town power plant is also the link between the coal industry and the personal finances of Joe Manchin III, the Democrat who rose through state politics to reach the United States Senate, where, through the vagaries of electoral politics, he is now the single most important figure shaping the nation’s energy and climate policy.

Mr. Manchin supplied a type of low-grade coal mixed with rock and clay known as “gob” that is typically cast aside as junk by mining companies but can be burned to produce electricity. In addition, he arranged to receive a slice of the revenue from electricity generated by the plant — electric bills paid by his constituents.

The deal inked decades ago has made Mr. Manchin, now 74, a rich man.

mRNA to Treat Long COVID

The Pfizer mRNA vaccine has been successfully used to treat a long COVID patient. 

he team gave Lester two doses of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, separated by about four weeks. Within 14 days of the first dose PCR testing indicated a distinct decrease in the volume of viral material gathered during each nasopharyngeal swab. About six weeks after the second dose Lester tested negative to SARS-CoV-2 for the first time 218 days.

Omicron infection not providing immunity

Unvaccinated folks who get the omicron variant of COVID aren't protected but vaccinated folks are. Vaccinations work.

unvaccinated people who recover from an omicron coronavirus variant infection are left with paltry levels of neutralizing antibodies against omicron. They also have almost no neutralizing antibodies against any of five other coronavirus variants, including delta. People who were vaccinated before getting an omicron infection, however, have strong protection against all five variants, and they have some of the highest levels of neutralizing antibodies against omicron.

Unbreakable Internet in Russia

 The Lantern app will soon be fully operational in Russia. It cannot be shut down by governmental actors. But just as it can be used for good, don't be surprised when it also gets used by conspiracy theorists who eschew accountability.

Within the next week, the network will be fully operational, allowing opposition voices to use the Lantern app to post content like videos from protests or updates on the war in Ukraine directly to the Lantern network. This would allow users to share it with other Lantern users without fear that the content will be removed or blocked.

The amount of traffic passing through Lantern’s servers has risen 100,000% in the last four weeks according to the company, though it did not provide a baseline figure for comparison. Lantern said it would not break out country-level user numbers but told VICE News that globally the app has been downloaded 150 million times and has 7 million active monthly users, double the number it had three years ago.

The growth has been so rapid that Lantern says Russia this week surpassed China as its biggest market in terms of traffic, though China has been the company’s primary focus for years. 

The developers have spent years playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the Chinese censors who maintain the Great Firewall, Beijing’s highly sophisticated network of filters, bans, and blocks that prevent the free flow of information online.

And just like in China, the developers of Lantern don’t have a clue how so many people in Russia have begun using their app.

It’s just word of mouth,” Lantern co-founder Wolf told VICE News. “We still don’t know. There are over 150 million downloads [of the app] and we haven’t spent one cent on marketing. So we’ve no idea how it spreads.”

Wolf and Lucas, who have decades of experience building and scaling successful tech products, both use pseudonyms to protect their identities, fearing retaliation from the regimes in Beijing, and now Moscow, for helping people circumvent censorship.

“Now I have a window to the normal world from this prison called Russia,” one Russian user said this week in an email to Lucas.

As the so-called “Digital Iron Curtain” has closed in recent weeks, Russian users have scrambled to find ways around it. In the days and weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, downloads of the top virtual private network (VPN) apps on Apple and Google’s app stores spiked, CNN reported.

What Putin Wants

Sanctions on Putin and oligarchs won't work. In Russia, it's power that counts, not wealth. 

In Western capitalist democracies, wealth often equates to access and influence. So it’s not surprising that many believe that sanctioning oligarchs can move them to pressure Mr. Putin to change course. That is a miscalculation. These oligarchs may hold wealth that connects them to power and can be used by Mr. Putin, but in Russia, that does not mean that they wield any power over him or those in the Kremlin.

The only people who can truly sway Mr. Putin are ideologues who share his views, the so-called siloviki. The word literally means people with force — the power that comes from being in the security forces or military. These insiders have been with Mr. Putin since his days in the K.G.B. or in the St. Petersburg municipal government, and they see themselves as protectors of Russia’s power and prestige. They have kept their money mostly inside Russia and out of reach of sanctions. And like Mr. Putin, they see the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, and believe this fight is for Russia’s “sovereignty and the future of our children.”

To influence them, the West must prioritize the things that they believe give Russia its superpower status: its oil and its military.Meanwhile, the best way to undermine Russia’s military is by limiting access to technology. As has become clear on the ground in Ukraine, the Russian military lacks the vital hardware and software used by other modern forces to gather real-time field intelligence, along with the communication systems necessary to use that intelligence effectively. And the days-long stalling of a tank convoy indicates that the Russians lack a sophisticated supply-chain system to bring food and gas to troops.

Sanctions cutting off access to the tools that keep Russia’s military operating — the overt exertion of power — can make a difference to those advisers around Mr. Putin. 

OSINT

Twitter and other apps are bringing truth as well as useful intelligence to the defense of Ukraine. OSINT is short for open-source intelligence.

In the footage, he found a landmark — an Orthodox church with four golden domes. He located it in Irpin, using Google Maps and a file photograph from the Associated Press to generate its precise coordinates. A scan of Discord, Reddit, and Twitter revealed chatter from witnesses of the bombing. Twelve minutes after spotting the footage, he felt confident the video was real, and posted the work on his Twitter account.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, said in an interview with The Washington Post that the community’s work is crucial for his country — so much so that a Ukrainian government app, called Diia, now allows citizens to field geotagged pictures and videos of Russian troop movements.

Much of the work could be more impactful in the long term. Activists, scholars and media professionals are using their data to create a verified timeline of conflict that could impact how countries are held accountable for war crimes.

This reached a turning point in 2014, when open source intelligence was used to track Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and provide evidence of the country’s involvement in shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, research scholars noted. Last year, during the Jan 6. insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, hobbyists disseminated intelligence online that federal agencies relied on to find rioters.

The core of this sleuthing is geolocation, due to its ease and impact. When a video or image of conflict surfaces, hobbyists scan the footage for landmarks or other clues, trying to pinpoint its location to verify its accuracy or debunk it as a propaganda attempt.

But they have grown more savvy, and the war in Ukraine has shown the breadth of intelligence hobbyists can gather through simple means. Some specialize in flight tracking and are able to show which military aircraft are flying near Ukrainian airspace at any time. Others use NASA’s database of fires to track “thermal anomalies” in Ukraine, to help back up claims of new fighting or shelling in a region.

Last week, his organization released a platform to document potential war crimes in real time. Through the work of open source hobbyists and others, Bellingcat has gathered over 400 verified, geolocated, and tagged incidents of potential war crimes in Ukraine, ranging from hospital bombings, neighborhood strikes and other attacks that have killed or injured civilians.

Ukraine, Higgins said, will “be seen as the first conflict where [open source] information was gathered by an online community and turned into useful information that was used for accountability.”

Daylight Savings Solution

Forget what the clock is set at. Open and close schools and businesses at whatever time works for them. There's nothing sacred about starting and ending a  workday at a specific time. We've been heading toward differing schedules for a long time now.

Members of the House who oppose the bill worry that under year-round daylight saving time, children would be going to school in the dark. But while they disagree with Rubio and his allies on how to set the clock, they seem to buy into the same unspoken assumption, which is that whatever Congress decides about the clock will govern how Americans live their lives.

Why, though, should Congress get to decide? The setting of the clock is less important than it’s made out to be. It’s really just a number. Let’s say the bill becomes law and everyone in, say, Vermont decides that it’s not safe for children to be going to school in the dark. There’s a simple fix: Start the school day in Vermont an hour later. That would instantly undo the damage.

Likewise for companies, local government offices, churches, restaurants, clubs — really, everyone. If the federal or state government sets the clock in a way that doesn’t suit you, adjust your opening and closing times to right the wrong. Simple!

While we’re at it, why stick to the same hours year-round? A school board might want to start classes later in the winter than in the spring and fall, effectively creating its own customized clock change. Or not. Whatever suits.

To be sure, such adjustments would create some coordination problems, which is probably why they weren’t made in the past. For years, governments and employers have stuck with ill-fitting opening and closing times, winter and summer, to keep their people in sync with one another and with people in other places.

But uniformity has never been all Americans cared about.

And now two new forces, Covid-19 and information technology, have made coordination problems less of a concern than ever before.

The surprising success of working from home during the pandemic has demonstrated that it’s the work, not the face time, that matters. For example, if school starts later in the winter, that would prevent working parents from getting to the office at the usual hour. In the past that would have been a career killer. Now, for many, it’s business as usual.

But if we’re going to standardize on one clock, I’d prefer that it be standard time. Springing ahead permanently, and not returning that borrowed hour in the fall, would rob us of an hour forever, which seems regrettable.

Technology and work arrangements have evolved to the point where we can rewind the clock to the preindustrial era in which people’s bodies were in sync with the rising and setting of the sun. There are still vestiges of that era: Parks and beaches are open from dawn to dusk. Muslims fast during daytime hours during Ramadan. In Judaism, there are 12 “seasonal hours” of daytime that are longer in the summer than in the winter.

Democrats and Hispanics

The Democratic Party's relationship with Hispanic voters needs a reality check. Hispanics make up a growing part of the non-college educated blue-collar work force. As Democrats lose workers, they lose Hispanics.

Members of the Democratic Party don’t just live in a distinct cultural bubble removed from the realities of their blue-collar counterparts, they are so removed from the rapidly growing Hispanic working class that many of them are now literally speaking a different language.

The growing cultural divide in America, in which Hispanics appear to be increasingly turned off by progressive mottos and movements, is linked to the education divide in America between college-educated and noncollege-educated voters of all ethnicities. According to Pew Research, Republicans increasingly dominate in party affiliation among white noncollege voters, who make up 57 percent of all G.O.P. voters. This in a country where 64 percent of voters do not have a college degree.

The Democratic Party is losing its brand among white, working-class voters and Hispanics. This is especially pronounced among Hispanic men and Hispanic noncollege-educated voters, who are trending more Republican, just as their white noncollege-educated peers are. Latinos are increasingly voting similarly to noncollege whites, perhaps because they don’t view themselves all that differently from them. Pew Research studies on Hispanic identity have shown that fully half of the country’s Hispanics view themselves as “a typical American”; fewer responded as identifying as “very different from a typical American.”

what unites most Hispanics is that they are an important share of the blue-collar noncollege-educated work force, and their presence in the labor force is only growing. The “essential workers” of the pandemic are disproportionately Black and Latino, and as a decidedly younger demographic, Hispanic workers are filling the roles of manufacturing, agricultural and construction trades in states with large Hispanic populations.

The party that is able to express the values of a multiethnic working class will be the majority party for the next generation. As we continue to watch the country’s culture war increasingly divided by education levels, it is quite likely that Latino voters will continue to trend, even if marginally, into the ranks of Republican voters. The country stands on the precipice of a significant political shift.

Republican-sponsored voter intimidation

If an armed canvasser knocks on your door and asks you whether you have participated in voting fraud, would you feel intimidated?

USEIP appears to have fully embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. Its website and the first page of its "playbook" include the slogan "We Are the Plan," frequently associated with QAnon believers. During a presentation organized by Sherronna Bishop, the former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert, USEIP leader Cory Anderson (who is also a member of the anti-government Three Percenter militia) described the briefing as "being red-pilled," according to the Times Recorder. (That expression, originally drawn from "The Matrix," is popular among QAnon followers and other far-right conspiracy theorists.)

Ukraine is Winning

Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic complains that credit is being given where credit is due. When Russians have to resort to broad-range stand-off attacks against civilian targets, they are using about the only tactic they have left after so many of their other tools have failed them.

Ukraine has made since 2014, thanks to hard-won experience and extensive training by the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Ukrainian military has proved not only motivated and well led but also tactically skilled, integrating light infantry with anti-tank weapons, drones, and artillery fire to repeatedly defeat much larger Russian military formations. The Ukrainians are not merely defending their strong points in urban areas but maneuvering from and between them, following the Clausewitzian dictum that the best defense is a shield of well-directed blows.

For example, most modern militaries rely on a strong cadre of noncommissioned officers. Sergeants make sure that vehicles are maintained and exercise leadership in squad tactics. The Russian NCO corps is today, as it has always been, both weak and corrupt. And without capable NCOs, even large numbers of technologically sophisticated vehicles deployed according to a compelling doctrine will end up broken or abandoned, and troops will succumb to ambushes or break under fire.

The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven.

Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.

As the University of St. Andrews’s Phillips P. O’Brien has argued, pictures of shattered hospitals, dead children, and blasted apartment blocks accurately convey the terror and brutality of this war, but they do not convey its military realities. To put it most starkly: If the Russians level a town and slaughter its civilians, they are unlikely to have killed off its defenders, who will do extraordinary and effective things from the rubble to avenge themselves on the invaders. That is, after all, what the Russians did in their cities to the Germans 80 years ago.

it should be noted that the United States has had exquisite intelligence not only about Russia’s dispositions but about its intentions and actual operations. The members of the U.S. intelligence community would be fools not to share this information, including real-time intelligence, with the Ukrainians. Judging by the adroitness of Ukrainian air defenses and deployments, one may suppose that they are not, in fact, fools.

The more you succeed, the more likely you are to succeed; the more you fail, the more likely you are to continue to fail. There is no publicly available evidence of the Russians being able to regroup and resupply on a large scale; there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. If the Ukrainians continue to win, we might see more visible collapses of Russian units and perhaps mass surrenders and desertions. Unfortunately, the Russian military will also frantically double down on the one thing it does well—bombarding towns and killing civilians.

Corporate Greed and Inflation

A significant, if not primary, contributor to our inflation is corporate profit margins.

increased profits from corporate America comprise 44.7% of the inflationary increase in costs. That means corporate profits alone are absorbing a 3% inflation rate on all goods and services in America (44.7% of 6.8% annual inflation), with all other factors causing the remaining 3.8%, for a total inflation rate of 6.8%. In other words, had corporate America kept the same average annual level of profits in 2021 as it did from 2012-2019 and passed on today’s excess to consumers, the inflation rate would be 3.8%, not 6.8%. And that’s a big difference, indeed it is the difference between Americans getting a raise, and seeing real wages decline. (It also could explain why inflation is lower in Europe - corporate profits there were very good in 2021, but not as good as in the U.S

Son of a Leningrad Survivor

 Arnold's message to the Russian people.

Another Autocracy Stumbles

We can see the Russian problems. Now Paul Krugman shines the light on China.

there are times when autocratic rule can look more effective than the messiness of democracies bound by rule of law.

Dictatorship, however, starts to look a lot less attractive if it continues for any length of time.

The most important argument against autocracy is, of course, moral: Very few people can hold unrestrained power for years on end without turning into brutal tyrants.

Beyond that, however, in the long run autocracy is less effective than an open society that allows dissent and debate. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the advantages of having a strongman who can tell everyone what to do are more than offset by the absence of free discussion and independent thought.

China, which is now experiencing a disastrous failure of its Covid policy.

But China is definitely not over Covid. Hong Kong, which for a long time seemed virtually unscathed, is experiencing hundreds of deaths a day, a catastrophe reminiscent of early 2020 in New York — back when there were no vaccines and we didn’t know much about how to limit transmission. Major Chinese cities like Shenzhen, a crucial world manufacturing hub, are back under lockdown. And it’s not at all clear when or how China’s new health crisis will end.

three things went very, very wrong.

First, as much of the world was turning to mRNA vaccines — a new approach adapted to Covid with miraculous speed — China insisted on using its own vaccines, which rely on older technology and have proved far less effective, especially against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Second, vaccination rates among China’s elderly — the most vulnerable group — have lagged. This may in part be because disinformation about mRNA technology has not only discouraged people from taking the most effective vaccines, but it has bled into distrust of vaccines in general. It may also reflect broader distrust of the government; China’s leaders lie to their people all the time, so why believe them when they say you should take your shots?

Finally, the zero-Covid strategy is extremely disruptive in the face of highly contagious variants like Omicron, especially given the weak protection provided by Chinese vaccines.

The thing is, all of these failures, like Putin’s failures in Ukraine, ultimately stem from the inherent weakness of autocratic government.

On zero Covid, would you want to be an economic official telling Xi that the cost of draconian lockdowns, a policy of which China was so proud, was becoming unsupportable?

And as I said, a government that lies all the time has trouble getting the public to listen even when it’s telling the truth.

Yet China, like Russia, is now giving us an object lesson in the usefulness of having an open society, where strongmen don’t get to invent their own reality.

How Autocracies Die

David Brooks lists the Achilles heels of these systems. 

The wisdom of many is better than the wisdom of megalomaniacs. In any system, one essential trait is: How does information flow? In democracies, policymaking is usually done more or less in public and there are thousands of experts offering facts and opinions.

People want their biggest life. Human beings these days want to have full, rich lives and make the most of their potential. The liberal ideal is that people should be left as free as possible to construct their own ideal. Autocracies restrict freedom for the sake of order.

Organization man turns into gangster man. People rise through autocracies by ruthlessly serving the organization, the bureaucracy. That ruthlessness makes them aware others may be more ruthless and manipulative, so they become paranoid and despotic.

Ethnonationalism self-inebriates. Everybody worships something. In a liberal democracy, worship of the nation (which is particular) is balanced by the love of liberal ideals (which are universal). With the demise of communism, authoritarianism lost a major source of universal values. National glory is pursued with intoxicating fundamentalism.

Government against the people is a recipe for decline. Democratic leaders, at least in theory, serve their constituents. Autocratic leaders, in practice, serve their own regime and longevity, even if it means neglecting their people.

the lesson is that even when we’re confronting so-far successful autocracies like China, we should learn to be patient and trust our liberal democratic system. When we are confronting imperial aggressors like Putin, we should trust the ways we are responding now. If we steadily, patiently and remorselessly ramp up the economic, technological and political pressure, the weaknesses inherent in the regime will grow and grow.

Who to Boycott

Some companies are funding Russia.

But, according to Sonnenfeld, there are, at the other extreme, 33 companies (as of Wednesday afternoon) that form a “hall of shame,” defying demands that they exit Russia or reduce their activities there.

Koch Industries, whose owners gave to right-wing causes for years, is now financing Putin’s war. The people who make Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Quilted Northern toilet paper, Vanity Fair napkins and Georgia-Pacific lumber are abetting the spilling of Ukrainians’ blood.

Like Reebok shoes? They’re being used to stomp on Ukraine. Authentic Brands Group, which also owns Aeropostale, Eddie Bauer, Brooks Brothers and Nine West, among others, is in the hall of shame.

Before you bite into a Cinnabon (or Carvel ice cream, Schlotzsky’s sandwich or Auntie Anne’s pretzel) consider that parent company Focus Brands is taking a bite out of democracy in Ukraine.

So is Subway. While selling you the All-American Club, it’s giving Ukrainians the Cold-Cock Combo by refusing to cut loose its 446 Russian franchises.

Several other household brands — Truvia and Diamond Crystal salt (Cargill), Avon cosmetics (Natura), LG appliances, ASUS laptops, Mission tortillas (Gruma) and Pirelli tires — are produced by companies on the shameful list.

Worse than Iwo Jima

 In 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Now, 20 days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers, according to American intelligence estimates.

Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.

With more than 150,000 Russian troops now involved in the war in Ukraine, Russian casualties, when including the estimated 14,000 to 21,000 injured, are near that level. And the Russian military has also lost at least three generals in the fight, according to Ukrainian, NATO and Russian officials.

Pentagon officials say that a high, and rising, number of war dead can destroy the will to continue fighting. The result, they say, has shown up in intelligence reports that senior officials in the Biden administration read every day: One recent report focused on low morale among Russian troops and described soldiers just parking their vehicles and walking off into the woods.

Late last week, Russian news sources reported that Mr. Putin had put two of his top intelligence officials under house arrest. The officials, who run the Fifth Service of Russia’s main intelligence service, the FSB, were interrogated for providing poor intelligence ahead of the invasion, according to Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert.

What Russia Really Wants

If we go back to the Mueller Report, we can see the outline of what Putin really wants in Ukraine. TL;DR, Be prepared for continued conflict until Russian regime change.

If the Russian climbdown is real—and with the additional caveat that there’s much we don’t know about the state of negotiations—then Kyiv must still be leery that Putin does not turn such a deal to his long-term advantage. It is worth considering the lessons of one previously aborted peace initiative when thinking about how Ukraine can prevent an unfavorable outcome now. That proposal, which would have benefited Putin significantly, came from a Russian spy who tried to get former President Donald Trump to endorse his plan. Looking at the contours of that draft initiative shows the sort of concessions that should be avoided now if at all possible

Over the course of many months from 2016 to 2018, though, Kilimnik sought to use Manafort’s position in Trump’s orbit to influence U.S. policy and push what Kilimnik described in emails as a Russia-endorsed plan to end the conflict in Ukraine, seemingly to Putin’s advantage. During a key August 2016 meeting at which Manafort gave campaign polling data to Kilimnik (who then allegedly passed it on to Russia), the two men discussed that possible “peace plan.” As the Mueller report described it:

Manafort and Kilimnik discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic. That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a “backdoor” means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.

Manafort lost his job before getting a chance to push his boss to help implement it as president. But we know that Kilimnik pressed Manafort about it for months after that meeting, even after Trump took office and Manafort was already under indictment for his work in Ukraine.

Also from the Mueller report:

Several months later, after the presidential election, Kilimnik wrote an email to Manafort expressing the view—which Manafort later said he shared—that the plan’s success would require U.S. support to succeed: “all that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from [Donald Trump].” The email also stated that if Manafort were designated as the U.S. representative and started the process, Yanukovych would ensure his reception in Russia “at the very top level.”

The outlines of the plan had three parts. First, the plan called for the “creation” of the “Autonomous Republic of Donbass” that would be formed “within the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that existed prior to April 2014, when the armed conflict began.” Those borders include more than 10 percent of Ukraine’s population, a vast amount of the country’s agricultural land and natural resources, and many of the cities now under siege and assault by Russian forces. It also includes the town of Mariupol, which has been devastated by Russian bombardment of civilians and is home to a crucial port. Kilimnik even named his proposal the “Mariupol plan.” The second element of the plan involved Ukraine incorporating this “autonomous republic” into its own body politic via a parliamentary vote that would grant the area “reintegration” into the Ukraine and its own political representation in the country. The “Autonomous Republic of Donbass” (ARD) would thus have influence over Ukraine’s political affairs. The third and final point of the plan would grant the region its own prime minister, who would be “a legitimate and plenipotentiary representative of ARD in talks with international structures.”

The key to the entire plan, which would give a Russian quisling control over a key region and ability to influence Ukrainian domestic and foreign affairs, was Trump’s endorsement. Kilimnik wrote:

Personal participation of the US President will lead to stopping the bloodshed, returning political balance and stability in Ukraine, creating a stable and effective pro-European legislative majority, able of implementing effective reforms.

As things stand, Russians still have not gained control of Mariupol, nor most other major Ukrainian cities. But if Putin won’t settle for anything less than something like the “Mariupol plan,” Ukraine could be in for more turmoil, even should Russia officially withdraw its forces and leave Ukraine, on paper, with the borders it had before this war.

Depending on Russia

Our advanced reactor economy depends on Russia for fuel. 

Russia supplies 20 percent of the low-enriched uranium needed to run American nuclear plants, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Others say the larger concern may sit with advanced reactor demonstrations expected to come online around 2028 that will require high-assay, low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. That’s because Russia is the only viable commercial supplier globally and other firms are years away from readily providing such fuel, they say.

If Rosatom were ruled out for U.S. and European buyers, von Hippel said, “that might end the surplus situation for the Western companies, and the price of [enrichment services] might go up; they’re very depressed right now.” Enrichment costs, he added, are especially critical for nuclear power plants in states with competitive electricity markets.