In his Washington Post column David Ignatius says there’s a lot to be encouraged about in the way the war in Ukraine is progressing:

Considering the failure of Russia’s conventional forces, there’s an obvious danger that Putin might turn to the domain in which Russia remains a superpower: nuclear weapons. But that would be even riskier for Russia than for the West. Any demonstration of Russia’s battlefield nuclear weapons would draw a devastating U.S. conventional military response — and probably cause the loss of China as an ally.

Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.

The phrase “other than for the Ukrainians” is a telling one. I have heard such wildly conflicting reports on what has happened in Ukraine that I have no idea how to assess that. For example, the estimates I have read of the number of people who have left Ukraine vary from 6 million to 30 million. The estimates of Ukrainian soldiers killed or wounded vary even more dramatically—anything from 20,000 to 700,000. What the actual figures are matter a lot.

I don’t see the solidarity that Mr. Ignatius does, either within NATO or in the world. Ten times as many people live in countries that aren’t aligned with the NATO view than in countries that do. Has the war isolated Russia or has it isolated the U. S.? And how do we know? I do think our European allies are united in not wanting to commit their own soldiers to the conflict but would be delighted if we did.

Based on recent reports it actually looks like Russia plans to foreclose Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

And at Responsible Statecraft Daniel L. Davis, who has been skeptical of Ukrainian victory all along, writes that Ukraine can’t win:

Trying to put a good face on the situation, Western officials and analysts told the Washington Post on Tuesday that “Ukraine’s military has so far embraced an attrition-based approach aimed largely at creating vulnerabilities in Russian lines.” That is not accurate. The UAF haven’t “embraced” an attrition-based approach, they have changed tactics to leading with small groups of dismounted infantry to try and penetrate Russia’s leading trench lines out of sheer necessity. Leading with armor simply won’t work, and if Ukraine had persisted in trying large armored assaults, they would have continued dying in large numbers.

The problem for Kyiv is that this “approach” is virtually certain to fail. The military geography of this entire region of Ukraine is characterized by open, flat terrain, interspersed with thin forest strips. Because Russia owns the skies and has considerable drone capacity, any time the Ukrainian soldiers move in the open, they are immediately subjected to artillery or mortar fire. If any armored vehicles move in the open, they are likewise quickly destroyed. The best the UAF can do is infiltrate small numbers of infantrymen into trenches where Russian forces are located.

It’s not that Zelensky’s forces are “going slowly” forward, it’s that they aren’t attaining any of their initial tactical objectives on the way to the Azov coast and it’s precisely because the combat fundamentals necessary to win are largely (and in some cases entirely) absent. They flatly don’t have the human resources or physical infrastructure necessary to succeed.

Now, it is always possible that Russia could suffer sudden political collapse, such as what happened in 1917, and Ukraine could still emerge successful. That, however, is extremely unlikely and Kyiv would be unwise to base their future hopes upon such an event.

I find lots of the reports puzzling. For example, although considerable glee was expressed at the Ukrainians’ latest attack on the Kerch bridge in the Western media, all of the damage reports I could find including the Ukrainian suggested considerably less damage than the first attack on that bridge.

In Foreign Affairs Max Bergmann argues for “regime change” in Russia:

Such a speech from Biden would assert that the obstacle to the West’s positive relations with Russia is Putin. Biden could remind Russians that when he entered office, he sought to engage and work with Putin, holding a summit in June 2021 with him in Geneva. Months later, Putin launched his unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine. He has demonstrated to Western leaders that he cannot be trusted and therefore cannot broker a lasting peace. He has lost all credibility. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for him for alleged war crimes. As long as Putin leads Russia, the United States and Russia will be adversaries and U.S. sanctions will remain in place.

adding an argument that Putin’s replacement could be no worse:

The prevailing assumption is that a Russian hard-line nationalist would be most likely to replace Putin. But Putin is already a hard-line nationalist.

I find many things in the piece puzzling. He confuses replacing a man with regime change, common in the Western press. If Putin were to be replaced it is very unlikely to be constitute regime change any more than electing Joe Biden president did.

Another is his assessment of Putin. He isn’t a “hard-line nationalist” but more of a centrist from a Russian perspective. Poll after poll has shown strong support of the war by Russians. Indeed, it appears to be the case that more think that Putin has been too lenient than that he has been too harsh.

I also find his account of the Prigozhin episode puzzling. Okay, what happened two weeks ago and how do you know? I’ve read explanations going every which way including that Prigozhin’s march towards Moscow was at President Putin’s behest to provide a pretext for removing military leaders who were inconvenient. I have no idea what happened and don’t honestly know how anyone else does, either. It remains mysterious.

What qualifies Mr. Bergmann to make such sweeping pronouncements? I’ve read his CV and to my eye it looks like that of a typical apparatchik.

As multiple cities worldwide record their highest temperatures ever, I find there are several points that should be made. We don’t know that the heatwave presently being experienced is a consequence of anthropogenic global warming. We also do not know that it isn’t. Arguendo let’s assume it is.

In his Wall Street Journal column Holman Jenkins makes a reasonable point:

If the goal were to reduce emissions, the world would impose a carbon tax. Then what kind of EVs would we get? Not Teslas but hybrids like Toyota’s Prius. “A wheelbarrow full of rare earths and lithium can power either one [battery-powered car] or over 90 hybrids, but, uh, that fact seems to be lost on policymakers,” a California dealer recently emailed me.

His numbers apparently originate with Toyota, setting off a small donnybrook in the green lobbying community. The same battery minerals in one Tesla can theoretically supply 37 times as much emissions reduction when distributed over a fleet of Priuses.

This is a shock only to those who weren’t paying attention. It certainly isn’t lost on government. Chris Atkinson, the Ohio State University sustainable transportation guru whose slogan I’ve cited before—“the best use of a battery is in a hybrid”—was a key official in the Obama Energy Department.

Our policies don’t exist to incentivize carbon reduction, they exist to lure affluent Americans to make space in their garages for oversized, luxurious EVs so Tesla can report a profit and so other automakers can rack up smaller losses on the “compliance” vehicles they create in obedience to government mandates.

Mining the required minerals produces emissions. Keeping the battery charged produces emissions. Only if a great deal of gasoline-based driving is displaced would there be net reduction in CO2. But who says any gasoline-based driving is being displaced? When government ladles out tax breaks for EVs, when wealthy consumers splurge on a car that burns electrons instead of gasoline, they simply leave more gasoline available for someone else to consume at a lower price.

IMO the point he makes that is correct is that hybrids should be preferred over EVs. I disagree with him on carbon taxes.

He might be correct if the taxes being proposed actually changed the incentives of those who produce the most emissions but they don’t. Carbon taxes are regressive. And producing carbon emissions increases geometrically with income. A carbon tax won’t dissuade Bill Gates from owning dozens of home, convince Jeff Bezos that his mega-yacht is unaffordable, or cause all of the very rich from flitting around the globe in private aircraft but all of those produce carbon emissions far beyond anything produced by you or I. They will cause the poor to choose among food, healthcare, and cooling their homes in the summer.

A final point that should be made is that Tucson, Phoenix, multiple cities in Texas and some of the other southern cities complaining that it’s too darned hot, shouldn’t exist at all, at least not in their present form. Their existence requires lots of water and air conditioning with the power to run it. I laughed out loud when I heard the mayor of Mesa, Arizona declaim that they planned to plant a million trees.

The rule of thumb is that an established tree needs about 10 gallons of water per inch of trunk diameter per day. Where do they plan to get the water? Mesa gets a lot of its water from the Colorado River. Arizona’s allotment from the river was just decreased—they won’t be getting millions of gallons more from it per day.

Trees do help, though. I recall a tour I was taking in Los Angeles years ago in which the tour guide observed that before the Spanish came the Los Angeles basin was hot and dry. When the Spanish came and planted orange, lemon, and olive trees, it became cooler and more humid. When the Americans came they tore out the oranges and olives, paved the areas where they had been, and it became hot and dry again.

To me the moral of the story is that there are some places that shouldn’t have large populations.

One last observation. I grew up in St. Louis without air conditioning. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Also via MSN this piece from the Wall Street Journal provides four different answers to the question that forms the title to this post. The answers provided are:

1. When Putin leaves power
2. When Ukraine says it ends
3. When Ukraine has recovered all of its pre-2014 territory
4. The war in Ukraine will never be over

Read the whole thing.

#1 is flatly wrong. Putin is not the greatest hawk in Russia or the most determined to restore former glory. Those most likely to succeed him are more hawkish and determined than he is.

#2 misstates the relative strength of Ukraine vs. Russia. It assumes that we have the will and ability to continue to supply Ukraine as long as Ukraine cares to fight and that given that Ukrainehas the ability to continue fighting indefinitely. That’s wrong, too.

#3 assumes that is Ukraine’s only objective.

I think that #4 is possible but it’s also possible that, assuming NATO does not enter the war directly, Ukraine will eventually lose the ability to continue fighting.

Via MSN, this from the New York Times, presumably a letter to the editor:

In these works, the antagonists are bound for strife because China has become too strong or because it is weakening; because America is too hubristic or too insecure; because leaders make bad decisions or because the forces of politics, ideology and history overpower individual agency. A sampling of their titles — “Destined for War,” “Danger Zone,” “2034: A Novel of the Next World War” and “The Avoidable War” — reveals the range and limits of the debate.

I don’t know if the United States and China will end up at war. But in these books, the battle is already raging. So far, the war stories are winning.

The U.S.-China book club is insular and self-referential, and the one work that all the authors appear obliged to quote is 2017’s “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” by Graham Allison, a political scientist at Harvard. He looks at the war between ascendant Athens and ruling Sparta in the fifth century B.C. and echoes Thucydides, the ancient historian and former Athenian general, who argued that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Sub in China for Athens and the United States for Sparta, and you get the gist.

Allison, best known for “Essence of Decision,” his 1971 study of the Cuban missile crisis, does not regard a U.S.-Chinese war as inevitable. But in his book he does consider it more likely than not. “When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception,” he writes. He revisits 16 encounters between dominant and ascendant powers — Portugal and Spain fighting over trade and empire, the Dutch and British contesting the seas, Germany challenging 20th-century European powers and other confrontations — and found that in 12 of them, the outcome was war.

I don’t believe that war with China is inevitable, desirable, or in the U. S. interest. China has its own national interests; we have ours. In some points they are congruent; in others not; in some they are in direct conflict.

I think our prime enemy is reflected by the late, great Walt Kelly in that clip from Pogo in April 1970. IMO it is even more relevant now than then and in more ways. Obtaining critical strategic materials from China is only prudent if China is a U. S. satrapy and that is in complete conflict with Chinese national interests as they see them. Since no other country is content with being a U. S. satrapy, we must necessarily produce them ourselves along with the entire supply chain that supports that production. That is the U. S. national interest. Not American empire.

Therefore my view is that we should be a lot less concerned with what China does or does not do and a lot more concerned about what we do or do not do.

or at least the writers and actors are on strike together which halts most activity. This was the story that this morning’s talking heads programs devoted a considerable portion of their time if not most of it.

To my eye the most interesting dispute is over the role of artificial intelligence and in particular generative artificial intelligence in the large language model form it has taken recently. It seems to me that the irony of the situation is lost on practically all participants. How much natural intelligence does it take to keep writing the same stories over and over again? And what is the role of the writer in movies that primarily consist of car chases and/or explosions and what little dialogue there is is heavily improvised? There is not a lot of creativity out there; no wonder they’re worried about generative AI.

The last time the writers and actors were on strike at the same time was in 1960 and Ronald Reagan was the long-time head of the Screen Actors Guild. He negotiated a pretty good contract for SAG. Maybe the same thing will happen again. I doubt. Not only is Fran Drescher no Reagan, the circumstances are very different.

These strikes are taking place in the context of an entertainment industry whose business model is failing. From 1913 to 1948 the model that evolved was one of motion picture studios that increasingly gained control of the theaters in which movies were shown. That ended in 1948 and the studios suffered a long painful death that continued into the 1960s. That coincided with the rise first of broadcast television networks and then with cable television companies. The rise of premium cable networks over the last 30 years or so saw increased intertwining of movie studios with cable television.

Now some of the biggest producers of “content” as it’s so blandly called are Internet streaming services, e.g. Netflix, Amazon, etc. Broadcast television is almost completely dead; just look at the Emmy nominations announced recently—almost all nominations went to product that was on cable or streaming.

The number of cable subscribers peaked in 2016.

That’s the context of these strikes. Movie studios have suffered possibly their worst period ever, beginning in 2020; broadcast television is practically dead; cable isn’t what it used to be. Add AI to this and you’ve got one fine mess.

Nobody has a right to a business model. I don’t know what business model will arise from present developments but it will be very different from what preceded it.

Ruy Teixeira considers a recent poll on U. S. immigration policy:

Taking immigration first, we asked voters to choose from three options:

1. People around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country;
2. America needs to secure its borders and create more legal and managed immigration paths to bring in skilled professionals and workers to help our economy grow; or
3. America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration.

Under a quarter (24 percent) chose the first option, emphasizing the right to asylum and admitting more immigrants, which is closely associated with the Democratic Party. By far the most popular option was the second one, emphasizing border security and skilled immigration, which 59 percent favored. The draconian third option, which favors just closing the border and reducing all immigration was chosen by 17 percent. The latter two positions outnumber the permissive first position by three to one.

Among moderates, the second position was chosen by an overwhelming 66 percent and just 18 percent favored the permissive first position, not much more than the 16 percent who favor the draconian third position. Among the swing-y pure independent group, the story was similar: 62 percent chose the second position and the same number—19 percent—chose the first and third positions.

It’s clear Democrats do not occupy the center ground here.

His poll found the same true for environmental policy and transgender policy: The positions staked out by the party organization are closely aligned with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and out of sync not just with the majority of Americans but with the majority of Democats.

How can the Democratic Party be so undemocratic? I’ve already provided my answer: the party organization is under the control of its progressive wing and I was widely criticized for stating that but it’s obvious to anyone who actually understand how the parties work today. Much more power is concentrated in the hands of the party leadership than was the case fifty years ago. When you recognize that Nancy Pelosi is a founding member of the House Progressive Caucus and Hakeem Jeffries was a member in good standing of the caucus for years. They each left of the caucus only when they assume a leadership position in the party.

But what about Joe Biden? Isn’t he a moderate? The policies he’s espousing are more closely aligned with the progressive wing of the party than with its moderates.

You may find this article at Phys.org by Nicola Scafetta interesting, frustrating, or infuriating or some of each. The article considers the role of the sun in climate change. Here’s the opening paragraphs:

Although the sun provides nearly all the energy needed to warm the planet, its contribution to climate change remains widely questioned. Many empirically based studies claim that it has a significant effect on climate, while others (often based on computer global climate simulations) claim that it has a small effect.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports the latter view and estimates that almost 100% of the observed warming of the Earth’s surface from 1850–1900 to 2020 was caused by man-made emissions. This is known as the anthropogenic global warming (AGWT) theory.

The answer to the question is that we don’t really know. However, rather than taking an the extreme precautionary principle approach that the IPCC seems to I think there’s another way of looking at things.

There are things we can’t do much about like the sun and its cycle and things we can do something about. Why not address some of the things we can do something about? Catastrophizing may be easier to organize mass movements around but it doesn’t actually produce practical solutions.

That’s why, for example, I think that hybrids are a better alternative to straight internal combustion engines than electric vehicles are. Not to mention that they’re much stingier in their use of materials like rare earths, the discovery, mining, and processing of which pose problems of their own.