Deep State, Shallow State, Peak State

Bill Moyer's website has a long essay by former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren:

Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State 

February 21, 2014 

by Mike Lofgren

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. 

– The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871) 

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.  

... Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance. 

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there.

... Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.  

How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. 

The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” 

A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. ... After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?”...

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

I think the concept of the Shallow State (campaign consultants, media, think tanks, etc.) as complement to the Deep State is pretty useful.

And then there's the Peak State (i.e., the nominal national leader) who often controls the Deep State, but who occasionally gets taken down by it, the way Nixon got taken down by a teaming up of the Deep State (J. Edgar Hoover's pal Deep Throat) and the Shallow State (Woodward and Bernstein).

Erdogan in Turkey was probably surprised to discover that to take down one hostile Deep State (the generals) he wound up empowering a new one (the Gulenists).

I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties. 

As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations.

Victoria Nuland gets her man

We haven't heard much from Our Woman in Kiev, Victoria Nuland (wife and in-law of the numerous Kagans), since her tapped phone call regarding her opinion of the EU's tepid enthusiasm for regime change in Ukraine was leaked in early February. But, her pick for new boss of Ukraine, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk rather than right nationalist Oleg Tyagnybok or heavyweight champ Vitali Klitschko, appears to have won out. From the NYT:

KIEV, Ukraine — Standing before a crowd of tens of thousands in Independence Square, the epicenter of the three-month civic uprising that ousted President Viktor F. Yanukovych, the lawmakers temporarily controlling Ukraine announced an interim government on Wednesday night to be led by Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, a veteran public official who has served as speaker of Parliament, foreign minister, economics minister and acting head of the central bank. 

The public presentation of Mr. Yatsenyuk, who will serve as acting prime minister, and more than 20 other proposed cabinet members, was a frenetic effort by establishment politicians to win the backing of the street protesters, whose persistence in the face of the deaths of more than 80 people last week in clashes with the police, ultimately dislodged Mr. Yanukovych from power. 

As the names of the proposed ministers were read from the stage — with flowers and candles blanketing the square in memory of the dead — it became clear just how completely the ordinary people on the street had seized control of the direction of Ukraine. Desperate for the crowd’s legitimacy, officials felt compelled to present the slate on stage in the square before putting it up for a vote by Parliament. 

I know this sounds crazy, but I'm reminded of how in 532 AD the Emperor Justinian got into a long argument with the crowd at the chariot races in Constantinople. That was the main way public opinion was factored into Roman and Byzantine politics: by custom, the emperor had to appear at the games, where he was presented with petitions and the crowd's reactions to his responses were used as proto-opinion polls. In this case, Justinian was less than politically deft, and his arrogance led to the hooligan fans of the Blue chariot racing team and the Green chariot racing team uniting in a massive riot against him.

But perhaps there are elements of cultural continuity in Orthodox civilization?

The reaction from the crowd was decidedly mixed. 

Jeers and whistles greeted some established politicians, and cheers for some figures with no government experience chosen because of their role in the uprising. But with Ukraine hurtling toward an economic catastrophe, and no time for protracted negotiations, the gesture of deference to the crowd seemed sufficient to move the process forward. 

“We need to change these faces,” said Alyona Murashko, a 28-year-old marketing specialist who stopped in the square to watch the announcement, carrying groceries on her way home from work. Ms. Murashko said that she approved of the choice of Olga Bogomolets, a physician, singer and activist as deputy prime minister for humanitarian affairs, and of Tatyana Chornovil, a crusading activist and journalist to lead Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau. 

Ms. Murashko, however, said she opposed Mr. Yatsenyuk and many of the other choices. “I wouldn’t like to see him even temporarily,” she said. “No one from current political parties.” Ms. Murashko said that she was glad that presidential elections would be held in May, but wanted parliamentary elections “as soon as possible.” 

Among those eliciting loud boos was Oleksandr V. Turchynov, who was elected by colleagues on Saturday as the new speaker of Parliament, and who has been authorized to carry out the duties of president, effectively putting him in charge of the country. Mr. Turchynov was not part of the slate announced on Wednesday night and will continue in his position even after the interim government is approved. 

On the whole, the makeup of the interim government suggested that Ukraine would now move more swiftly to improve ties with the West, potentially reviving the sweeping political and trade agreements with the European Union that Mr. Yanukovych scuttled in November, setting off protests in Kiev and other cities. 

Mr. Yatsenyuk is an ally of Mr. Yanukovych’s archrival, the former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko. ... 

Mr. Yatsenyuk, by contrast, is largely viewed as an able technician with a firm grasp of economic policy and foreign affairs. Ukraine’s economy is in tatters and it is in desperate need of a rescue package from the International Monetary Fund, which has said it will demand painful austerity measures and long-delayed economic changes in return for any assistance. ...

Mr. Yatsenyuk was one of three opposition leaders in Parliament who were among the chief organizers of the street demonstrations. Another, the ex-champion boxer Vitali Klitschko, who heads a party called the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, has already announced his candidacy for president. The third, Oleg Tyagnybok, is the leader of the nationalist Svoboda party, which is popular in Western Ukraine but has limited support elsewhere. 

Among the crowd-pleasing choices in this regard were Dmitry Bulatov, the leader of a group called AutoMaidan, who was designated as minister of youth and sport, and Eugene Nyschuk, an actor who has served as M.C. from the stage in Independence Square throughout the protests and who was selected as culture minister.

  

Background primers on World War G

From the NYT today:

Putin Orders a Surprise Army Exercise Near a Fragile Ukraine 

By STEVEN LEE MYERS, RICK GLADSTONE and MICHAEL R. GORDON 1:10 PM ET 

President Vladimir V. Putin’s move appeared to be a show of strength amid the unrest gripping Ukraine, and in response the Obama administration said any Russian military intervention in the country would be a “grave mistake.”

War game exercises are a way to semi-mobilize without announcing a mobilization. Back in July 1914, Russia's announcement of mobilization set off chain reactions that proved unstoppable. So announcing "army exercises" are a way to get your men in their tanks without announcing you are going to war. The good news is that war games can be called off. The bad news is that war games can turn into war.

I want to toot my own horn here by pointing out that my last four columns in Taki's Magazine serve as background behind today's worrisome news. I've had a bad feeling for some time about the hyping up of World War G that accelerated back in 2013. Back in December I wrote a blog post:

World War G and the Military-Industrial Complex 

America's Global War of Terror has been a huge moneymaker for Washington's Beltway, but it's starting to get a little old. Looking to the future, why not a replay of a tried and true honeypot: an arms race with Russia? ... 

But to justify lots more spending we need some reason to be angry at the Russians. They don't have 53,000 tanks pointed in the general direction of the Fulda Gap anymore, so the pretext isn't immediately obvious. 

Good question ... 

I know, gays!  

And Ukrainians, although they're kind of boring ... Hey, there must be some Ukrainian gays! Somebody get to work on this pronto.

Thus, my February Taki's columns have been obsessed with exploring perspectives on European geopolitics:

World War III
February 05, 2014 

With the 100th anniversary of World War I upcoming and old enmities between America and Russia resurging in contemporary form—for example, Glenn Beck recently said, “I will stand with GLAAD against…hetero-fascism” in Russia—due to the approach of that gayest of sporting events, the Winter Olympics, I thought it worth taking a look back at the war that didn’t happen: the one between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. 

So I dug out my battered copy of Sir John Hackett’s 1978 sci-fi novel, The Third World War: August 1985, which scared the hell out of me when I received it as a Christmas present on December 25, 1979, the day the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. ... 

The Kremlin then dusts off its contingency plan to convert summer war games in East Germany into a full-scale invasion of West Germany.

The Borders of Empire
February 12, 2014 

... And that short tour of Winter Olympics sites raises the seemingly abstract but politically fraught question: Where’s a good place to draw national borders?
One tempting answer is along major rivers. After all, if you glance at a map, you’ll notice that big rivers tend to be long and fairly linear, just like you hope your ideal border would be. 

Moreover, wide rivers are more militarily defensible than flat land. That’s why Warsaw Pact contingency plans for invading Western Europe assumed that the Rhine had to be reached to forestall a NATO counteroffensive. 

The peacetime political problem with using navigable rivers as borders, however, is that they frequently separate people who don’t want to be separated.

Nationalism Is a Blast
February 19, 2014 

The Russians, lacking all natural defenses to the West, are sensitive to the proximity of hostile alliances. They believe, with much historical justification, that in February 1990 Secretary of State James Baker and West German leader Helmut Kohl promised Mikhail Gorbachev no Eastern expansion of the NATO military bloc in return for allowing the reunification of Germany by withdrawing the 380,000 Soviet troops from East Germany. 

The West has repeatedly violated that gentleman’s agreement, in 2008 even putting Ukraine and Georgia on track for NATO membership. (Georgia’s subsequent invasion of Russian-held South Ossetia proved a major embarrassment, however.) 

The US media’s ideological justifications for its anti-Russianism involve gay rights (”World War G”) and democracy (“World War D”). But those concepts don’t appear much in evidence in scenes from central Kiev, where the City Hall of the embattled pro-Russian government had been occupied since December by masked men swinging iron bars. ... 

For example, when was the last tank-v.-tank battle?  ... 

The two countries that have the tanks, terrain, and mutual border to conceivably replay the Battle of Kursk are Russia (2,562 tanks in service and plenty more in reserve) and Ukraine (725 tanks running).

Conservatism in Russia and America
February 26, 2014 

Similarities and differences between Russian and American conservatism—especially in regard to the topic of the moment, Ukraine—can be observed in the thought of Russian geopolitical theorist Aleksandr Dugin, director of the Center for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University. ... 

After last week’s coup in Kiev, Dugin said in an interview on Russian state television: 

I suggest that it is necessary that Russia, in an organized way, help Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

When asked by the interviewer what he meant by “an organized way,” Dugin replied, “with tanks.”

Spike Lee: There goes the neighborhood

At an interview, movie director Spike Lee offered up a fun (but quite serious) denunciation of how white people are ruining the neighborhood where he grew up in Brooklyn. That reminds me that Spike is slightly to the right of Shaka Zulu.

What the Surveillance State can do

In Turkey, as I reported back on New Year's Day, the followers of Imam Gulen of the Poconos have used their control of test prep centers to go on a long march through the institutions, infiltrating Turkish security forces with interesting results for their former ally, the prime minister, who presumably has been skimming extravagantly from all his construction projects.

Now that wiretapping has gone from analog to digital, lots of information is readily available to those seeded in the right spots to blackmail or destroy their rivals. From the NYT:

Currently, though, the show to watch is Turkey’s own political crisis, set off by a corruption scandal that has played out like a serial drama through the steady flow of leaked telephone conversations. The most sensational one was released Monday night, an apparently wiretapped conversation in which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, worried about an investigation closing in, is heard telling his son to get tens of millions of dollars out of the house. ...

Mr. Erdogan did not stay silent, though. His office quickly released a statement saying, “Phone recordings published on the Internet that are alleged to be between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son are a product of an immoral montage that is completely false.”... 

The corruption inquest represents the greatest challenge to Mr. Erdogan’s power in more than a decade. While it has been cast by the government as a conspiracy mounted by followers of the Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, Mr. Gulen himself has strongly denied any involvement. 

However, most analysts say his adherents are entrenched within the Turkish state, where they are in a position to do a great deal of damage if they so choose. The crisis actually stems, many say, from a fallout between Mr. Gulen and Mr. Erdogan, who were once allies in the current Islamist governing coalition.

Yet, it remains hard to know much about the Gulenists themselves.. In 1999, just after he defected to the U.S., the Imam's enemies released a video of him telling his followers to move quietly in the arteries of the system until the time was ripe. Since then, he apparently learned his lesson to avoid electronic communications: little has surfaced documenting what exactly Gulen's intentions are. He seems mostly to communicate only orally with his followers visiting his fortified compound in Pennsylvania.

I often wonder what effects advances in technology will have on where important people work and live. Gulen seems to have gone to one extreme: take refuge in a country with a friendly, stable government and set up shop in the countryside 110 miles from JFK and only deal with trusted contacts face to face.

Of course, at high levels, big shots have been dealing with the implications of bugging technology for a long time. Here's a story from a 1982 Jack Anderson column:

There was a historical showdown, for example, between President Lyndon Johnson and Sen. Robert Kennedy in early 1968. It was before the New Hampshire primary; Johnson was still planning to run for re-election and Kennedy was thinking of challenging him. He asked for a private meeting with the president. 

LBJ gave a terse order to Jack A. Albright, head of the White House Communications Agency: "Let's record the meeting." 

"We put in one microphone," recalls Albright, now retired. "It was hidden in the table. It should have worked beautifully. Except it didn't." 

Albright later figured out why. 

Kennedy had brought a briefcase into the Oval Office, and kept it in his lap throughout the 30- to 40-minute meeting. "We weren't listening, of course," Albright explained. "All we could do was record. When we tried to play it back, all we got was a 'bzzzzeettt.'" 

Kennedy, no stranger to White House bugging, had carried a jamming device in his briefcase. When LBJ heard the bad news, Albright recalls, he drawled: "That son-of-a-b----."

 
And of course there's the often-told (but perhaps apocryphal) story about the Canadian hockey team in Russia to play the Soviets in 1972 who were worried about bugs in their hotel room:

Phil Esposito, centre: The chandelier story goes that me and [Wayne] Cashman were looking for bugs [that KGB planted in players rooms]. We find a little lump under the rug. It was a box with a series of screws and we start unscrewing it until we hear a big crash below. We peep through the screw-hole downstairs and see that a chandelier in the hotel ballroom had crashed to the floor.

   

Aleksandr Dugin and the Great Game

My new column in Taki's magazine considers the rightwing Russian geopolitical theorist Aleksandr Dugin:

Because Ukraine (a word that may mean “borderlands,” although like everything else about the place, the etymology remains in dispute) lacks both natural defenses and an agreed-upon national identity, this wide expanse of Slavic-language-speaking territory has long attracted the attention of the most audacious geopolitical philosophers. They have seen it as the crucial blank slate upon which to inscribe their designs for world domination. In turn, Ukraine’s fundamental vulnerability motivates locals toward extremes of nationalism (although not always in agreement with their neighbors' conceptions of nationalism). 

Ukraine’s perennially precarious geopolitical situation was memorably parodied in a 1995 Seinfeld episode in which Kramer and Newman are playing the board game Risk on the subway. Kramer taunts Newman, “I’ve driven you out of Western Europe, and I’ve left you teetering on the brink of complete annihilation.” 

Newman desperately bluffs, “I’m not beaten yet! I still have armies in the Ukraine.” 

“The Ukraine? You know what the Ukraine is, it’s a sitting duck,” scoffs Kramer. “A road apple, Newman. The Ukraine is weak. It’s feeble. I think it’s time to put the hurt on the Ukraine….” 

A fellow passenger, a deep-voiced Ukrainian in a fur hat, is naturally outraged. He asks, “Ukraine is game to you?” before smashing the board. 

To the misfortune of the people who live there, Ukraine is a game to the idea men (and women, such as neoconservative insider Victoria Nuland) of numerous surrounding deep states.

Read the whole thing there.

    

NYT: Blacks don't get enough Oscars for playing nonblacks

From the NYT:

Racial Barriers Still Hold Back Hollywood's Black Talent
By REUTERS FEB. 25, 2014, 8:15 P.M. E.S.T.

LOS ANGELES — When Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the best-acting Oscar categories and Sidney Poitier was honored with a lifetime achievement award in 2002, the night was a watershed for black actors in Hollywood. 

Since then the debate about Hollywood diversity among the African American community has continued to ebb and flow, but one fact remains constant: nearly all black actors are still only being recognized by the Academy Awards for playing specifically black characters in film. 

... This year, three black actors will be vying for Oscars at the March 2 ceremony, and if "12 Years a Slave" wins best picture, it will be the first film by a black director to do so. 

But as black films and actors are being celebrated by Hollywood, there is no clear indication that the industry has turned the corner on increasing roles not based on race. 

That could be partly explained by the underrepresentation of black talent in senior positions in film studios and among the 6,000-plus members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who vote for the Oscars. 

"When roles in otherwise mainstream movies go to black actors that aren't necessarily written for (them), I think that's a point when there will have been some profile change," said Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California and an expert on African American cinema and culture. "We are not there yet." 

Roles in mainstream movies do go to black actors that weren't originally written for them -- it's just that those kind of movies don't get Oscar recognition. Thirty years ago, Beverly Hills Cop was planned around Sylvester Stallone, but Eddie Murphy wound up playing the role. Murphy wasn't nominated for an Oscar in it, but then Stallone wouldn't have been either.

Murphy and Stallone have each only been nominated once, both for highly ethnically specific roles: Murphy for Dreamgirls and Stallone for Rocky.

Seven of the nine best-picture nominees in contention for an Oscar this year, including large ensemble casts in "American Hustle" and "The Wolf of Wall Street," do not have any black actors in leading or supporting roles.

American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street are both period pieces inspired by true stories of white collar criminality, so wouldn't it be racist to imply that blacks were involved?

Both are set in East Coast white ethnic milieus by East Coast white ethnic directors (David O. Russell and Martin Scorsese) who specialize in movies about non-Protestant whites.

And both movies are well-cast: would Kerry Washington really have been funnier than Jennifer Lawrence? Would Kevin Hart have been better than Jonah Hill as the drug-addicted cousin-marrying sleaze Donny Azoff?

The one piece of casting in either movies that is a little off is Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort (whom you can see introducing DiCaprio as himself in New Zealand at the end of Wolf). DiCaprio doesn't attempt a Long Island accent and it's not clear how the vaguely Slavic-looking DiCaprio is supposed to be Rob Reiner's son. (I had assumed from the trailer that Reiner would play Jonah Hill's dad.) But, other than the accent, DiCaprio works hilariously hard throughout the movie. If you want to see a famous movie star look like he's about to have an aneurysm, several times, well, The Wolf of Wall Street is just your ticket.

The two films that do, "Captain Phillips" and "12 Years a Slave," have landed acting nods for stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is up for best actor, and Lupita Nyong'o and Barkhad Abdi in the supporting categories. 

British actor Ejiofor and Kenyan-Mexican actress Nyong'o both play slaves in McQueen's pre-civil-war drama, while Somali-American newcomer Abdi, in his first acting role, portrays a Somali pirate who seizes command of a cargo ship.

In other words, African-Americans had a poor Oscar year, but non-American blacks had a very good one, but why talk about complications of ethnicity when we can talk about race and keep it simple: black and white?

More than 50 black actors and actresses have been nominated and won Oscars throughout the history of the Academy Awards. Most have done so for playing specifically black characters, either historical or fictional. 

Washington managed to play an alcoholic airplane pilot in "Flight," a role for which he was nominated for best actor in 2013. But that was one of the rare exceptions.

Terrific performance, fine movie. Washington's performance is pretty similar to DiCaprio's in terms of a big star working hard.

In general, though, movies with generic leading roles that could be filled by any ethnicity don't get as much Oscar attention. For example, Mark Wahlberg, a former Boston juvenile delinquent, is mostly a a non-specific leading man who competes for roles in commercial movies with other leading men. Most Mark Wahlberg movies don't get a lot of Oscar respect, but some of the ones where he stays closer to home, such as The Departed (Scorsese) and The Fighter (Russell) do.

Similarly, Will Smith competes with Tom Cruise for a lot of sci-fi roles as the Last Man on Earth and the like, but he's only been nominated twice for an Oscar, both times (Ali, Pursuit of Happyness) for biopics playing real life black characters. (Similarly, Tom Cruise hasn't been nominated since 2000.) Oscar voters are prejudiced in favor of detailed drawn-from-life roles, and are content to let the box office reward roles that either Will Smith or Tom Cruise could have played.

"Why couldn't there be an African American starring in the role that Joaquin Phoenix plays (in 'Her')?" said Boyd. "When you see that, then there's a change."

I'm not sure Professor Boyd understands what the W in SWPL stands for.

By the way, as usual, nobody is interested in Mexican-Americans.

Richest man in Ukraine is a blond Muslim

Ukraine is currently a really, really poor country, with a GDP per capita about a third of Poland's, significantly lower than Belarus, and barely higher than prewar Syria's.

But Ukraine has a lot of billionaires. The most recent Forbes global list of billionaires finds ten billionaires in Ukraine (versus four in Poland). According to race / history / evolution notes, six have Eastern European Slavic names. Apparently, they are fairly recent additions to the list. 

In contrast, five years ago there were only four billionaires. According to a 2009 Jewish Telegraph Agency article:

Three of Ukraine’s four billionaires are Jewish 

By Vladimir Matveyev June 11, 2009 10:37pm 

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — Three of Ukraine’s four billionaires are Jewish, according to the Ukrainian Korrespondent magazine’s annual list. 

Igor Kolomoysky, 47, a co-owner of the Privat business group and president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, leads the Jewish billionaires on the list with $2.3 billion, down from $6.6 billion in 2008. 

Victor Pinchuk, 48, is next at $2.2 billion, down from $8.8 billion, followed by Gennady Bogolyubov, 47, with $1.7 billion, down from $6.2 billion. 

Rinat Akhmetov

Heading the list is Rinat Akhmetov, who owns FC Shahtar Donetzk, with $9.6 billion — a more than threefold drop from $31.1 billion in 2008. 

Interestingly, Akhmetov is a blond Tatar Muslim. He owns the Donetzk soccer team in the industrial east and has been friendly with the overthrown president.

Eduard Dolinsky, executive director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said the large number of Jews on the Korrespondent list creates a mixture of pride and anxiety within the country’s Jewish community. He said it could strengthen anti-Semitic stereotypes during financial crises in Ukraine, where Jews comprise approximately one half of 1 percent of the population of 46 million.

Since then the number of billionaires has gone up, whether due to economic recovery, a policy of making the oligarchs look more like Ukraine, or additional looting. Whether the new billionaires with Slavic names are Russians, Russophone Ukrainians, Ukrainophone Ukrainians, or something else is beyond me, but is possibly not irrelevant to recent events.

Most of the oligarchs are nimble political operatives with ties to several political camps, so nobody expects the list to change too much.

   

The Shallow State

The term "Deep State" is an Italian / Turkish notion that elected officials' influence on policy, perhaps especially on foreign policy, is potentially restricted by a shadowy network of serious men with experience in the serious organs of state. But, we should not overlook how much American foreign policy is seen by the rest of the world as up for sale by what we might call the Shallow State: glad-handing, self-promoting American image-maker campaign consultants (e.g., James Carville) who charge big fees around the world based on their relationships with high government officials in Washington.

The commenter with the reassuring nom de plume Drunk Idiot writes:

Speaking of David Axelrod and "Astro Turf," for years, Mr. Axelrod has run a firm in Chicago, ASK Public Strategies, that specializes in creating fake grass roots support for projects/big deals that clients are having trouble selling to the public (he was supposed to divest himself when he went to the White House in 2009, but somehow he got around the laws, stayed control of his firm, and had business dealings with the firm's clients while in the White House).  ...

BTW, Axelrod and David Plouffe also run a political consulting firm called AKPD Message and Media. Among AKPD's past clients is former Ukranian president Yulia Tymoshenko, who before being imprisoned, lost the presidency in 2010 to the now-deposed-and-in-hiding Viktor Yanukovych (a.k.a., the most evil, despotic tyrant in the world for the moment).  

As luck would have it, the interim president sprang Ms. Tymoshenko out of prison on Saturday, and she's free to run in the upcoming impromptu election.

I wonder how much the overseas business dealings of consultants who have been Washington insiders both drives American foreign policy and encourages foreign governments to do crazy stuff because their American consultants have implied to them that they can drop a word in the President's ear.

I remain fascinated by a recent historical event that is now generally brought up mostly in distorted form: Georgia's decision to start a tank war with Russia in 2008 over Russian-occupied South Ossetia. These days, this usually is remembered as Russia attacking Georgia (which would make more sense considering the size differential, but didn't actually happen). For example, an oped in the NYT today, Has the West Already Lost Ukraine? arguing for the EU and NATO to stick it to Russia, disingenuously says:

Such ineffectiveness first became apparent in 2008, when NATO could not decide whether to offer Georgia a clear invitation to join. Russia immediately took advantage of the situation, going to war with Georgia to “protect” the breakaway region of South Ossetia and forcing the country to back off its rapprochement with the West.

I'm not going to defend Russian occupation of South Ossetia, other than to say that Georgia's surprise invasion of Russian-occupied territory was similar to Egypt's and Syria's invasions of Israeli-occupied territory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Except, it made even less sense without the assumption of superpower intervention. The GOP candidate John McCain certainly provided the rhetoric:

McCain to Georgian President: "Today, We Are All Georgians"

But the Georgian government miscalculated how Washington worked. The responsible adult at the Pentagon, defense secretary Robert Gates, airlifted Georgian troops home from Iraq to help in the fighting, but otherwise showed little enthusiasm for risking getting America into a shooting war with Russia.

Why did the government of Georgia think they had a plan that would work? Perhaps it had something to do with them paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to McCain's chief foreign policy advisor for "consulting" work. Did Randy Scheunemann's sales pitch lead the Georgians to believe they were buying control over American foreign policy? Nobody in Washington seems all that interested in finding out, perhaps because it might put a crimp in the influence peddling gravy train.

American campaign consultants have become ubiquitous abroad, as Politico reported in 2009:

President Obama campaign consultants make mark overseas 

By KENNETH P. VOGEL & BEN SMITH | 11/18/09 1:20 PM EDT 

In Kiev and Kharkiv and other cities in Ukraine, American political consultants who worked against one another in Iowa and New Hampshire and then in the general election are facing off again in a somewhat surreal Eastern European replay of the 2008 campaign. 

The firm headed by Hillary Clinton’s former chief strategist, Mark Penn, is helping run incumbent President Victor Yushchenko’s campaign. Meanwhile Paul Manafort, whose firm worked on Republican John McCain’s losing effort, and Tad Devine, a top strategist on the Democratic presidential campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, are consulting for Victor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian frontrunner in the polls.

Clinton was the Secretary of State in 2009 and Kerry is the Secretary of State in 2014.

For Penn, Manafort and Devine, foreign elections have been a lucrative source of business for years. But for the Chicago-based media consulting firm AKPD [founded by Axelrod and Plouffe, among others], the contract to help guide Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s campaign is part of a new, growth area of business that presented itself after the firm helped Barack Obama win the White House last fall. 

Also assisting Tymoshenko is John Anzalone, a pollster who worked on the Obama campaign. And Obama's lead pollster in the campaign, Joel Benenson, also worked briefly in Ukraine this year, helping supporters of a rival presidential candidate, former Parliament speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who courted comparisons with Obama (and whose billboards bear a faint resemblance to the iconic posters of Obama by Shepard Fairey). 

The Ukraine race is hardly the only international opportunity available for consultants who had a hand in the Obama campaign. Since Obama's historic election in November, AKPD and Benenson Strategy Group alone have advised candidates or parties in Argentina, Bulgaria, Romania, Israel and Britain and have turned down offers to work in many more countries around the globe. 

The attraction is easy to understand. Foreign campaigns typically pay more than domestic ones do, and they are lower risks for consultants coming off the image-enhancing boost of a presidential campaign, according to James Carville, the former Clinton strategist and talking head, who has worked for candidates in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan (where he worked this year on Ashraf Ghani’s second-tier presidential campaign along with Devine’s firm).  

“If you help elect a president and then you get involved in a governor’s race and you lose, it’s going to be a little bit damaging to your reputation,” he said. “But if you go to Peru and you run a presidential race and you lose, no one knows or cares. So why go to New Jersey and lose for 100 grand when you [can] go to Peru and lose for a million?” 

What exactly does James Carville know about Peruvian politics that makes his insights worth a million bucks? There are technical aspects to campaigning (e.g., how big a sample size you need for opinion polls), but most of that expertise is well-known to corporate market researchers in Peru. So, what exactly are you paying Carville for, other than he was a close associate of Bill Clinton, who in 2009 was married to the American Secretary of State?

American presidential campaign consultants have been earning huge fees from international campaigns since at least 1969, when Joe Napolitan — a Democratic consultant who worked on John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign and was credited with engineering Hubert Humphrey's surprisingly narrow 1968 loss to Richard Nixon — helped reelect Ferdinand Marcos as the Philippines’ president. 

After helping elect Bill Clinton in 1992, consultants Carville, Stan Greenberg and Paul Begala went on to work for candidates in Israel, South Africa, Greece and the United Kingdom, just to name a few. And Penn's expansive international practice got a boost when he began polling for President Clinton, who recommended Penn to then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who then became a longtime client. 

It’s difficult to track foreign campaign payments to American consultants, since they don’t fall under U.S. campaign finance or lobbying reporting requirements and most countries lack rigorous disclosure rules, but Ukrainian politics are thought to be particularly lucrative.

I bet.

Manafort’s and Penn’s firms have been involved in campaigns there for years. In fact, during last year's U.S. presidential campaign, Obama's allies at the Democratic National Committee highlighted Manafort's business partnership with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and suggested their firm’s work for Yanukovych conflicted with McCain’s criticism of Yanukovych’s ties to then-Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

The upcoming presidential election in Ukraine is being watched closely given its geopolitical significance in U.S.-Russian relations. 

AKPD client Tymoshenko was once seen as such a reliable American ally in a regional battle for pipelines and strategic influence that Russian prosecutors put out a warrant for her arrest on smuggling charges. But she’s since made her peace with the Kremlin and is seen as playing a more complex game with both sides — which may help explain her choice in American consultants. 

"In the Ukraine and in other post-communist countries, they have this misconception about Washington politics: They think that somehow if you sign up AKPD or other former Obama people, you sign up the support of Obama," said Taras Kuzio, a senior fellow in Ukraine studies at the University of Toronto who has done political consulting in Ukraine. 

"They don't understand the separation of business and politics, which doesn't exist in the Ukraine or in these other post-communist countries," said Kuzio.

   
But these kind of arrangements break down the separation of business and politics in America. The government needs foreign entanglements in places like Ukraine because that's how people like David Axelrod, Mark Penn, and James Carville cash in. If the U.S. minded its own business more, why would random foreign political parties hire them?
  

Violent overthrow of elected government = "Democracy"

From the NYT:

Wary Stance From Obama on Ukraine 

By PETER BAKER    FEB. 24, 2014

WASHINGTON — Televisions around the White House were aglow with pictures of Ukrainians in the streets, demanding to be heard and toppling a government aligned with Russia. It was an invigorating moment, and it spurred a president already rethinking his approach to the world. 

That was a different decade and a different president. While George W. Bush was inspired by the Orange Revolution of 2004 and weeks later vowed in his second inaugural address to promote democracy, Barack Obama has approached the revolution of 2014 with a more clinical detachment aimed at avoiding instability. 

Rather than an opportunity to spread freedom in a part of the world long plagued by corruption and oppression, Mr. Obama sees Ukraine’s crisis as a problem to be managed, ideally with a minimum of violence or geopolitical upheaval. While certainly sympathetic to the pro-Western protesters who pushed out President Viktor F. Yanukovych and hopeful that they can establish a representatively elected government, Mr. Obama has not made global aspirations of democracy the animating force of his presidency. ...

“These democratic movements will be more sustainable if they are seen as not an extension of America or any other country, but coming from within these societies,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. ... 

To some critics, though, that justifies a policy of passivity that undercuts core American values. 

“The administration’s Ukraine policy is emblematic of a broader problem with today’s foreign policy — absence of a strategic vision, disinterest [sic] in democracy promotion and an unwillingness to lead,” said Paula J. Dobriansky, an under secretary of state for Mr. Bush. 

Mr. Obama’s commitment to democracy promotion has long been debated. 

Advocates say he has increased spending on projects that encourage democratic reform in places like Africa and Asia while directing money to support changes in the Arab world. At the same time, they said, he has cut back on democracy promotion in Iraq, Pakistan and Central Asia. 

One of the strongest advocates for democracy promotion in Mr. Obama’s circle has been Michael A. McFaul, first the president’s Russia adviser and then ambassador to Moscow. But Mr. McFaul is stepping down. Mr. Obama’s nominee for the assistant secretary of state who oversees democracy programs, Tom Malinowski, has been languishing since July waiting for Senate confirmation. 

For Mr. Bush, the focus on spreading democracy preceded his decision to invade Iraq, but it was inextricably linked to the war after the failure to find the unconventional weapons that had been the primary public justification. The goal of establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East began driving the occupation, but it became tarnished among many overseas because of its association with the war. 

... In January 2005, Mr. Bush declared it his policy to support democracy “in every nation” with “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” 

For a time, Ukraine was a model. The newly elected president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, was welcomed at the White House and addressed a joint session of Congress. “It was the poster child for ‘democracy can work, we’re on a roll,’ ” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine now at the Brookings Institution. 

Yet like other places, the heady days in Kiev eventually gave way to political paralysis and retrenchment. Mr. Yushchenko failed to consolidate support and ultimately was replaced by his nemesis, Mr. Yanukovych, in a democratic election.

Wait a minuite ... The tyrant who was just driven out in a violent coup was democratically elected? That's confusing.

The unresolved debate over whether Ukraine should be more tied to Europe or Russia led back to a similar showdown over the past weeks and months, this time more violent, with more than 80 killed. 

So, all those masked men with clubs weren't protesting for democracy but for whose team Ukraine would be on?

... On the ground has been Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state who previously worked for Mr. Bush’s administration and is passionate about anchoring Ukraine in the West. A leaked recording of a conversation she had during the height of the events showed her discussing ways to bring the opposition into the government.

That's putting it mildly.

Mr. Obama waited until last week, three months into the crisis, to make his first statement in front of cameras. Aides said he wanted to wait until the critical moment, and it came when Americans saw indications that Mr. Yanukovych might turn loose the military on the protesters. ... 

Critics saw that as too little, too late. “Regrettably, the West viewed the situation as a crisis that needed to be tamped down rather than an opportunity for positive change,” said David Kramer, a former Bush administration official now serving as president of Freedom House, a nonprofit group that advocates democracy around the world. 

Others said caution might be justified. “It doesn’t seem to me that the Obama administration is so invested in that democracy theme,” said Mr. Pifer, but that “may not be a bad thing.” ...

You can see the pressures on an unenergetic President exerted by the deep state, which is primarily concerned, like Charlie Sheen, with Winning. And "democracy" is just a club (literally, in the case of last week's coup).

   

The ignominious failure of Occupy Wall Street

In light of the events in Kiev, it's worth looking back on the ignominious failure of Occupy Wall Street, which was restricted to an unstrategic small park rather than, say, Times Square, and was eventually broken up by Mayor Bloomberg's cops with little fuss.

Here's the original ad in Adbusters that set off Occupy Wall Street in 2011. While enormously successful initially, the incompatible elements of the ad foreshadowed Occupy Wall Street's ultimate impotence.

Notice in the background the promise of street rioting: to the right, a hooded brawler brandishing a table leg as a club, to the left what appear to be riot cops grappling with fighters. The stout lads who carried off the coup in Kiev would find this imagery galvanizing.

On the other hand, the centerpiece is an unintentionally comic depiction of superior feminine cultural refinement rising above masculine capitalism. 

Uh ... the reason New York is the ballet capital of America is because of all the money generated by Wall Street. So, a struggle promising street fighting over who has better aesthetic taste -- the people who make the money made on Wall Street or the people who spend the money made on Wall Street -- wasn't ever really going to go anywhere. In the battle between the ballerinas and the Masters of the Universe, there will never be a final victor because there's way too much fraternizing with the enemy.

And the text "What is our one demand?" attracted process-oriented protesters whose endless yakking about what our one demand should be bored and repelled the left hooligans who might have created a few iconic martyrs by provoking the cops into over-reaction.

(By the way, Arturo di Modica's Charging Bull sculpture is probably the most popular piece of guerilla street art of the last generation: the sculptor secretly plopped it down in front of the New York Stock Exchange late one night in 1989. The authorities initially hauled it off, but popular opinion demanded it be made permanent. Money-loving Chinese tourists have developed the tradition of rubbing its now shiny testicles for good luck.)

    

Right Sector v. politicians in Ukraine

From the NYT:

Ukrainian Protesters See Too Many Familiar Faces in Parliament After Revolution 

All the same, the site [sic] of luxury cars dropping off members of Parliament at the colonnaded legislature building, is now guarded by “self-defense” units that previously battled government forces, has stirred dismay and anger. 

“Again we see Mercedes and BMWs bringing deputies who are supposed to represent the people,” said Mr. Kuak, “We don’t want to see these people again. We want to see people from the square, from the revolution.” 

"Ukraine is game to you?"

But as with any revolution, the question of who should represent the turbulent forces that created it is a difficult one. The revered heroes of Ukraine’s revolution are squads of helmeted young men with clubs who risked their lives to hold back government forces as they tried early last week to seize Independence Square, known as Maidan. The center of Kiev is now scattered with shrines to those who died, each one piled with flowers left by grateful residents. 

“We need people from Maidan, not people like you,” screamed an angry woman as Volodymyr Lytvyn, a former speaker of the Parliament known for shifting with the wind, left the legislature building. As he tried to answer questions from the crowd, protected by two bodyguards and a solid wrought iron fence, a cry went up clamoring for “lustration of everybody,” a term usually associated with the purge of officials and politicians suspected of serving Communist regimes before the revolutions of 1989 across Eastern and Central Europe. 

Peppered with angry demands that the Parliament raise pensions, reopen closed hospitals and find work for the jobless

I am not sure how popular the West's usual IMF austerity plan is going to play.

, Mr. Lytvyn struggled to respond but basically called for patience, a virtue that is likely to be in short supply if the interim government does not manage to convince people it is working to improve their lives, not line its own pockets. 

Mr. Turchynov, the speaker and effectively Ukraine’s new president until elections, gets credit for swiftly shepherding a raft of legislation through Parliament to establish the legal basis for a post-Yanukovych order. But few see him as representing the revolution. 

“He knows parliamentary routines but he does not have the support of the people,” said Nikita Kornavalov, a teacher, 29, who left a job in Norway to support what he hopes will be a new era free of the corruption and brutality that have marred the country since its independence in 1991. 

But even those who want a decisive break with a political class seen as corrupt and self-serving acknowledge that the heroes of the street might not make the best rulers. One of the most prominent leaders of the street forces is Dymtro Yarosh, the head of Right Sector, a coalition of previously fringe nationalist groups. But his elevation to government would terrify many Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and accelerate the risk of a dangerous break-up. 

“Yarosh would be good in the stage security service or the police, but not as a minister,” said Ms. Nikanchuk, the economist.

The usual process, such as with the IRA, is that you make the guys who beat the cops into the cops. 

    

What just happened?

When something big happens, it's useful to read articles carefully for details before a Narrative hardens.

The following article from the New York Times is a little hard to follow because it tries to tie together several Ukrainian threads with a lot of taunting of overthrown president Yanukovych for being a L-O-S-E-R. But it sure sounds like the key event in the Ukraine last week was the "seizing of an Interior Ministry armory in the western city of Lviv and the transportation of those weapons to the outskirts of Kiev, the capital."

As His Fortunes Fell in Ukraine, a President Clung to Illusions 

By ANDREW HIGGINS and STEVEN ERLANGER FEB. 23, 2014

KIEV, Ukraine — As his allies deserted him and throngs of people bayed for his blood almost within earshot of his office, President Viktor F. Yanukovych took time out on Friday to celebrate Ukraine’s first gold medal at the Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. In a message of congratulations to the women’s biathlon relay team, he praised its “power and will to win.” 

Shortly before issuing that message, Mr. Yanukovych, still driven by a “will to win” of his own that many others in his crumbling administration had abandoned, signed an agreement with three opposition leaders that he hoped would keep him in power until December, and perhaps longer. 

“He was fighting hard to preserve whatever he could and yield the least,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, the foreign minister of Poland, who spent hours with Mr. Yanukovych as part of a team of European diplomats who mediated the accord. 

“His big miscalculation, as always, was to leave things too late. Timing is everything.” 

By late Friday afternoon, Mr. Yanukovych’s time had run out. Between the signing ceremony for the peace deal, held at the vast, colonnaded building that houses Ukraine’s presidential administration, and his break for Olympic cheerleading, the president’s prospects had taken a drastic turn for the worse: Hundreds of riot police officers guarding the presidential compound and nearby government buildings had vanished. 

“It was astonishing,” said Mr. Sikorski, who, while leaving the presidential building, watched in dismay as police officers jumped into buses and drove off. “That was not part of the deal. Astonishing.” 

The departure of the police had been days in the making, a result of a sequence of events that began late on Wednesday with the seizing of an Interior Ministry armory in the western city of Lviv and the transportation of those weapons to the outskirts of Kiev, the capital. Violent clashes on Thursday, which left more than 80 protesters and many police officers dead, enraged the opposition and sapped the will of Mr. Yanukovych’s enforcers, if not Mr. Yanukovych himself. 

By the end of Friday, the deal that Mr. Yanukovych had believed would win him at least a few more months in office was dead, discarded the moment enraged protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square learned of it. But Mr. Yanukovych was on a plane to the eastern city of Kharkiv, a planned trip that he still appeared to believe would be just another official visit in his four-year-old presidency. 

The political crisis erupted in November after Mr. Yanukovych rejected, at the last minute, a trade deal with the European Union that he had been promising to sign for months. Throughout, the president displayed an almost delusional disregard of the forces gathering against him, along with a misplaced trust in his supporters’ loyalty and determination to defend him. 

“He was living in an illusion right to the end,” said a Ukrainian politician close to the president’s entourage who asked not to be named because, like many in Mr. Yanukovych’s camp, he feared attracting unwelcome attention. “He did not believe it was over.” 

Like Nicolae Ceausescu — the brutal and sinister Romanian leader who, even after being taken captive in December 1989, continued to believe that he would prevail — Mr. Yanukovych seemed to persevere in the belief that he could hold on. After misjudging the mood on the street time and time again, he was simply overtaken by reality. 

... He went on to declare that he had not resigned and had no intention of doing so, denouncing “traitors” in his own camp and dismissing protesters as hooligans and vandals who had staged a coup. Recalling that he had bounced back from trouble before and rebuilt his political power base, the Party of Regions, after the tumult of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, he vowed to stay in the country and make a public report every day on what he was doing to re-establish his position as president. 

Mr. Yanukovych has not been heard from since. ... 

The events that led to his ouster accelerated early last week after a month of relative calm. On Tuesday, empowered by a new aid package from Russia announced the day before, Mr. Yanukovych pressed to remove an encampment of antigovernment activists from Independence Square, where they had been cursing his government since November. 

Squads of riot police overpowered the outer ring of defenses protesters had set up and advanced to within 25 yards of a stage in the center of the square, called the Maidan. 

Running out of options, the protesters mounted a final, desperate defense, a so-called ring of fire stoked with tires, firewood and even their own sleeping bags and pads. 

But Andrei Levus, deputy head of the Maidan “self-defense” forces, the umbrella organization of militant activists fighting the government, knew he had reinforcements on the way. Protesters in Lviv had overrun an Interior Ministry garrison and were en route to Kiev with the captured military weapons. 

In most countries, the Interior Ministry isn't a semi-comic bureaucracy in charge of forest rangers, it's the Clampdown. Moreover, in the Soviet Union, the Ministry of the Interior had its own 200,000 man army that could be used to put down a military coup. So, the Interior presumably has some fairly heavy duty weapons. (Of course, these days, practically every government agency in the U.S. seems to have its own Kevlar-vested automatic weapon-armed quasi-military.)

“I’m reluctant to talk about this because we are protesters and not illegal armed groups,” Mr. Levus said. “But the square was about to look different. There would be more people, and they would not have had empty hands.” 

Despite the dwindling of the protective fires, the protesters decided to hold on to the square long enough for both sides to consider the significance of the arrival of the weapons in the capital. 

Using a member of Parliament as an intermediary, Mr. Levus opened a line of communication with a deputy interior minister, whom he declined to name. It appeared that Mr. Yanukovych, perhaps sensing that his security forces were reluctant to press the crackdown, was inclined to turn to the army for help. He had fired the armed forces chief of staff, Col. Gen. Volodymyr Zamana, on Monday. 

Ukraine's army is about 60% conscript, although the draft was ended by Yanukovych last October.

“We understood they had a few hundred fanatical riot police, but the rest of the police would not fight,” Mr. Levus said.  

These days it's getting harder and harder to find thousands of guys willing to fight old-style battles, in part because modern guns are just too scary. (That was John Mueller's discovery about the Balkans wars of the 1990s -- there was so much draft dodging that much of the actual fighting was outsourced to prison gangs and soccer hooligans: men who like violence for the sake of violence.) So, who has more hundreds of ultras willing to fight and die matters.

Several street fighters who were on the barricades early Thursday morning said that they saw police officers walking away from their positions, and that this emboldened them. Some protesters fired hunting rifles and shotguns. Police lines crumpled. 

“Our people are ideologically motivated, and on the contrary, they were demoralized,” Mr. Levus said. “They did not want this fight. And he understood that our people were ready to run against gunfire.” 

Mr. Levus said he received a call on his cellphone around noon on Thursday from the deputy interior minister. “I told him, ‘We will guarantee the safety of the police if they leave the city,’ ” he said. ...

The timeline in the article is vague, but I suspect this followed a skirmish in the preceding hours in which the fighters regained their lost turf, at the cost of several dozen dead. Most of the dead have been attributed to pro-government "snipers" -- i.e., not machine guns.

Mr. Yanukovych, for his part, had begun discussions with the European mediators. According to Mr. Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, the president was digging in his heels, telling the French, German and Polish diplomats that he was not to blame for the crisis and refusing even to consider setting a date for an early election. 

Mr. Sikorski said he told Mr. Yanukovych that the only way to sell a deal to the opposition was to specify when a new presidential election would be held. “You need to declare on what date you’ll resign,” he said he told the president. 

Mr. Yanukovych “went white,” Mr. Sikorski said. But the deadlock lifted after the Ukrainian leader received a phone call shortly afterward from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “He came back, he was agreeing to limit his time in office,” Mr. Sikorski said. “That made everything possible.” ...

When the protesters in Independence Square heard the details of the deal, they made clear it was a nonstarter. Furious that Mr. Yanukovych would be allowed to stay in office until December, the crowd chanted, “Out, bandits,” and “Death to the criminal.” 

Volodymyr Parasiuk, a leader of one of the fighting units, took to the stage and announced that his men would begin armed attacks if Mr. Yanukovych had not resigned by morning. 

By dawn, well-organized groups of protesters armed with clubs and shields, but not guns, were already swarming toward Mr. Yanukovych’s offices, the Cabinet of Ministers building (the headquarters of the government) and Parliament. With the police forces gone, they met no resistance. 

         
So, my guess about what happened is that the streetfighters' display of a willingness to die in winning a small arms battle largely before their threatened deployment of the looted military weapons demoralized the elected government's defenders, who walked away rather than have the weaponry escalate.

But, that's mostly surmise on my part.
 

Tom Friedman: Google hires on "general cognitive ability" but "not I.Q."

Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times:

How to Get a Job at Google 

FEB. 22, 2014 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.” ... 

“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. 

“If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information."

Okay ... 

It's funny that, say, 98% of the readers of Tom Friedman don't find this funny. They're just nodding along ...

From the Wikipedia article on The g Factor:

The terms IQ, general intelligence, general cognitive ability, general mental ability, or simply intelligence are often used interchangeably to refer to the common core shared by cognitive tests.

Psychologist James Thompson, who actually gives face to face IQ tests such as the Wechsler, recently wrote:

IQ has gained a bad reputation. In marketing terms it is a toxic brand: it immediately turns off half the population, who are brutally told that they are below average. That is a bad policy if you trying to win friends and influence people. There are several attacks on intelligence testing, but the frontal attack is that the tests are no good and best ignored, while the flanking attack is that the tests are too narrow, and leave out too much of the full panoply of human abilities. 

The latter attack is always true, to some extent, because a one hour test cannot be expected to generate the complete picture which could be obtained over a week of testing on the full range of mental tasks.  However, the surprising finding is that, hour for hour, intelligence testing is extraordinarily effective at predicting human futures, more so than any other assessment available so far. This is not entirely surprising when one realises that psychologists tried out at least 23 different mental tasks in the 1920s (including many we would find quaint today) and came to the conclusion that each additional test produced rapidly diminishing returns, such that 10 sub-tests were a reasonable cut-off point for an accurate measure of ability, and a key 4 sub-tests suffice for a reasonable estimate. 

So, when a purveyor of an alternative intelligence test makes claims for their new assessment, they have something of a mountain to climb. After a century of development, intelligence testers have an armoury of approaches, methods and material they can bring to bear on the evaluation of abilities. New tests have to show that they can offer something over and above TAU (Testing As Usual). 

Years ago, this looked like being easy. There is still so much unexplained variance in ability that there was great confidence in the 60s that personality testing would add considerable explanatory power. Not so. Then tests of creativity were touted as the obvious route to a better understanding of ability. Not so. Then multiple intelligences, which psychology text books enthusiastically continue touting despite the paucity of supportive evidence. Not so. Then learning styles. Not so. More recently, emotional intelligence, produced partial results, but far less than anticipated. Same story for Sternberg’s practical intelligence. The list will continue, like types of diets. The Hydra of alternative, more sympathetic, more attuned to your special abilities, sparkling new tests keeps raising its many heads. 

What all these innovators have to face is that about 50% of all mental skills can be accounted for by a common latent factor. This shows up again and again. For once psychology has found something which replicates!

Thompson also offers a visual analogy for thinking about g, the general factor of intelligence:

Grasp a bunch of flowers in your hand, making sure you hold them towards the bottom of the bunch so that it splays out in a pleasing fashion, and you are well on your way to winning a lady’s heart, and to understanding Spearman’s law of diminishing returns. 

The general factor of intelligence is strongest at lower levels of intelligence. It may be a case of “All neurones to the pump”. When abilities are low, most problems are difficult. In such cases, all resources have to be thrown at the problem. When abilities are higher there is more spare capacity for differentiation of abilities. Brighter persons have a lower proportion of their abilities accounted for by a common factor, even though the have higher absolute abilities. 

So, if we stick to the flowers analogy in this post-Valentine’s day phase, the flowers of intellect of less able persons are tightly held together. The vector of “flowerness in common” runs from the bottom of the bunch of flowers to about two thirds up the bunch. In bright persons “flowerness in common” runs from the bottom to about one third up the bunch.

  

Kiev: Where were the libertarians?

A reader writes:

What I like about this whole revolution is that it is the ultimate shut-up-button for libertarians. 

Whenever libertarians moan about nationalists you can now say: "Well, when Ukraine was in trouble, who fought for liberty? Where were you guys?" 

I'd like to see Bryan Caplan answer that question. 

That's why patriots/nativists are necessary. When the going gets tough, it's not the progs or the immigrants or the libertarians who will defend or take back, it's the people who will fight for their country and want to save it for their progeny.

     

NATO's new HQ: $1.5 billion

NATO has been building a new headquarters in a suburb of Brussels, Belgium, which now looks like it will wind up costing $1.5 billion or more.

Why? 

You might think that, what with the Warsaw Pact having been disbanded on February 25, 1991, NATO might be looking to shed office space, maybe rent out some of its surplus square footage to yoga studios, tattoo removal businesses, medical marijuana dispensaries, and other 21st Century growth sectors, not build itself a bigger command center. But, according to NATO:

The new NATO Headquarters will be a secure, collaborative network-enabled capability supporting NATO business for you and for future generations. 

Well, that clears a lot of questions up.

The construction of the new NATO Headquarters started in October 2010 and is planned to be completed early 2016. NATO will start to move immediately after completion.

"Flexibility" is the key word:

The design of the new headquarters provides flexibility to NATO. 

The new building will be able to accommodate NATO's changing requirements into the future as the design and the standard fit-out allows for a configurable use of the building. 

The design of the building, using standard components which provide additional flexibility for the future. 

The new building will enable all Allies to have the space they require and there is also space for expansion should the need arise.

Where will flexible NATO be expanding after Ukraine and Georgia? Mongolia? Kazakhstan? The Kamchatkan Republic? The Republic of Volgograd?

  

No looting

From the NYT:

KIEV, Ukraine — An eerie calm and a light mist shrouded President Viktor F. Yanukovych’s sprawling residential compound just outside the capital on Saturday morning as street fighters from the center of Kiev made their way inside, gingerly passing a wrought-iron gate and cautioning one another about booby traps and snipers. 

They found none of either but discovered instead a world surely just as surreal as the charred wasteland of barricades and debris on the occupied central plaza that has been their home for months. It was a vista of bizarre and whimsical attractions on a grand scale, a panorama of waste and inexplicable taste. 

They saw about a half-dozen large residences of various styles, a private zoo with rare breeds of goats, a coop for pheasants from Asia, a golf course,

I think you can see the golf course under construction on Google Maps. Enter "Novi Petrivtsi," then switch to Satellite view and look for the big dirt construction site in the forest west of the reservoir. Private golf courses are extremely hard to hide these days.

a garage filled with classic cars and a private restaurant in the form of a pirate ship, with the name “Galleon” on the stern. 

One man in the 31st Lviv Hundred, the small band of antigovernment militants that took control of the compound, hung a Ukrainian flag on a lamp post. A few dozen others walked about, seemingly dazed by what was happening. Some raised their clubs, pipes and bats into the air and yelled, “Glory to Ukraine!” and “Glory to its heroes!” 

Whether it was the toppling of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines or of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, the breaching of the presidential palace gates is a milestone of a revolution. But Kiev on Saturday was unusual in one sense. There was no sacking. The opposition unit that took control of the president’s complex, called Mezhigorye, kept it intact, at least for now. On Saturday, the president fled, and the presidential guard melted away. But members of the Lviv-based “hundred,” who had repeatedly confronted Mr. Yanukovych’s security forces on the streets, posted guards around his residential compound and prevented looting even as swarms of gawking Kiev residents strolled through its grounds. 

The reason, the street fighters said, was to preserve evidence of the ousted leader’s lavish lifestyle for his prosecution. ...

Autocrats seem to have a propensity for private zoos, and Mr. Yanukovych’s palace complex contained multiple enclosures for exotic animals. ... 

The complex extended well over a mile along the river and was immaculately landscaped with hedges, lawns and birch trees, and a golf course of graceful swales, sand traps and pools of crystalline water. 

Even as the crowds grew, there was no sign of looting. 

Except for what had already been looted.

   

NYT: Time to get back to WWT

Meanwhile, from the front of NYTimes:

OP-ED | JULIA BAIRD 

The Courage of Transgender Soldiers 

Why does the U.S. military still define gender nonconformity as a disorder?