February 25, 2014

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).
   

February 24, 2014

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. 
    

February 23, 2014

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.
     

February 22, 2014

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?
  

Crimea, fyi

Crimea, a rugged peninsula in the Black Sea that is part of Ukraine due to a Soviet-era symbolic gesture of redrawing administrative boundaries, but is also home to the biggest Russian Navy base in the Black Sea, will be coming more into the news. So, here is a bit of background from Wikipedia:
Crimea is now an autonomous parliamentary republic, within Ukraine,[6] which is governed by the Constitution of Crimea in accordance with the laws of Ukraine. ... 

This problem of a Russian-speaking enclave within Ukraine also existed from 1992 onward, but compromises were hammered out by the people involved. Whether that will still be possible due to the subsequent expansion of NATO and the EU eastward remains to be seen.
On 18 May 1944, the entire population of the Crimean Tatars was forcibly deported in the "Sürgün" (Crimean Tatar for exile) to Central Asia by Joseph Stalin's Soviet government as a form of collective punishment, on the grounds that they had collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces.[15] An estimated 46% of the deportees died from hunger and disease.[citation needed] On 26 June of the same year, the Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek population was also deported to Central Asia. ... 
On 19 February 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union issued a decree transferring the Crimean Oblast from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR.[19] 

This was a symbolic gesture by the Soviets to thank Ukrainian cossacks for allying with Moscow 300 years earlier in 1654 in their war of independence from Poland.
Ethnic groups 
According to 2001 Ukrainian Census, the population of Crimea was 2,033,700.[44] The ethnic makeup was comprised the following self-reported groups: Russians: 58.32%; Ukrainians: 24.32%; Crimean Tatars: 12.1%; Belarusians: 1.44%; Tatars: 0.54%; Armenians: 0.43%; Jews: 0.22%, Greeks: 0.15% and others. ... 
Ukrainian is the single official state language countrywide, and is the sole language of government in Ukraine. According to the census mentioned, 77% of Crimean inhabitants named Russian as their native language; 11.4% – Crimean Tatar; and 10.1% – Ukrainian.[49] In Crimea government business is carried out mainly in Russian. Attempts to expand the usage of Ukrainian in education and government affairs have been less successful in Crimea than in other areas of the nation.[50] 
The number of Crimean residents who consider Ukraine their motherland increased sharply from 32% to 71.3% from 2008 through 2011; according to a poll by Razumkov Center in March 2011,[51] although this is the lowest number in all Ukraine (93% on average across the country).[51]

Off the top of my head, I would assume that the rise in pro-Ukrainian sentiment in Crimea from 2008 to 2011 was due to a pro-Russian winning the Ukrainian election of 2010.
Surveys of regional identities in Ukraine have shown that around 30% of Crimean residents claim to have retained a self-identified "Soviet identity".[52] 
Demographic trends 
The population of the Crimean Peninsula has been consistently falling at a rate of 0.4% per year.[53] This is particularly apparent in both the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic populations, whose growth rate has been falling at the rate of 0.6% and 0.12% annually respectively. In comparison, the ethnic Crimean Tatar population has been growing at the rate of 0.9% per annum.[54] 
The growing trend in the Crimean Tatar population has been explained by the continuing repatriation of Crimean Tatars mainly from Uzbekistan.

One goal in building up Sochi as a resort might be to replace Crimea as a destination for Russian tourists.

The Muslim Tatars of the Crimea are famously reasonable for Muslims. A really bad sign would be if the Saudis started paying to radicalize Crimean Tatars. A cursory web search doesn't find much evidence for that yet, thankfully.
   

What it took

"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history that has any other factor ..."
Mr. Dubois, Starship Troopers

The moral victory of the hard men of the Ukrainian opposition in Kiev in trampling on the most recent European-negotiated compromise solution and successfully driving the elected President out of the capital comes not just from dying bravely, but from winning. 

It's worth recalling what happened on Thursday before it gets tidied up. Right after dawn, the fighters opened passages through their defensive barriers and charged the terrified riot police, who opened fire on them. Scores of the attackers were shot down, but enough crossed the no man's land to capture dozens of police and drive the rest back. This combination of sacrifice and triumph provided the moral basis for tearing up the latest compromise and leaving the fighters' bands in charge of the streets. I doubt if either dying or winning alone would have sufficed.

Eventually, the politicians and bankers will retake control, but it's worth remembering the events as they happened.
    

Chicks dig Right Sector

From the NYT:
Growing Support, and Tea From Young Women, Embolden Kiev Street Fighters 
By ANDREW E. KRAMER   FEB. 21, 2014 
KIEV, Ukraine — The street fighters in Independence Square, kitted out with motorcycle helmets, plywood shields and baseball bats, are an intimidating lot by any measure, and this week they turned whole battalions of riot police officers on their heels in epic, bloody clashes that stunned the world. ...
The exploits and fearsome appearance of the fighters, known as the defenders of Maidan, as the square is known, have been elevated to lore, at least among supporters of the opposition. Old men pat them on the back, children revere them, and women want to be their girlfriends.
“They are the best Ukrainians,” said Olena Iaschuk, 26, a website editor with a ready smile, who was making the rounds of the barricades to offer warm tea from a thermos, stepping gingerly among heaps of paving bricks. “They are the bravest men, they are fighting for our freedom, they defend us and they are our heroes.” 

Well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind.
If Independence Square has become a crucible to test physical courage, many of the men who passed that test say they could not have done so without the undying enthusiasm of people like her. 
Of course, not everyone considers them heroes. Within their ranks are fighters who tried to immolate the police with petroleum bombs, and some groups of protesters have been sustained and driven by dark, nationalistic ideologies from Ukraine’s past. But many, if not most, people in Kiev wholeheartedly support the men. 
The adulation is palpable and only grew this week. “We want to cheer them up, and we want to support them,” Ms. Iaschuk explained. “They smile, and they say thank you for the tea, and sometimes ask for our telephone numbers. And we say, ‘No, boys, only after you bring us victory.’ ” 
Her friend Galyna Kolodkevych, 26, a professor of Ukrainian literature at a college in Kiev, said she wanted to marry one of the men as soon as possible. Her future husband, she said, should belong “only to the Right Sector,” a coalition of hard-line street groups that have played a prominent role in the fighting. ...

Above is a Right Sector propaganda video.

According to a Reuters article, "Insiders say the group has its origins among nationalist-minded soccer fans - the word 'sector' in Russian denotes the spectator terraces of a stadium - and includes individuals from far-right organizations from across the country." But don't trust me to get translations right. (By the way, more than a few Right Sector fighters are Russian-speakers.)

On the other hand, here is pro-Ukrainian Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, in the New York Review of Books trying hard to assure the New York Review's elderly leftist subscribers that Moscow, not Kiev, now represents the real right wing. In contrast, Snyder explains, "An important hotline that [Ukraine] protesters call when they need help is staffed by LGBT activists."

I don't know, though. Judging from videos, the lads who retook Independence Square from the riot police on Thursday and who are (if still alive) presumably enjoying tonight the traditional rewards offered to a nation's brave young men by its appreciative young women don't look too gay to me.
The objects of this outpouring of admiration are men like Dmitry Iliuk, 29, a classical violinist who teaches music in a high school in the town of Verkhovyna, in western Ukraine. 
Thursday morning found Mr. Iliuk crouching behind a plywood shield, preparing for a dramatic and risky offensive to reverse an effort by the police to press into the square two days earlier. Protesters opened a breach in their barricades shortly after dawn, then ran a hundred yards or so across a scorched buffer zone to confront — and quickly push back — the riot police, who were firing shotguns at them. It was an action that turned the tide, but also cost the lives of at least 70 people. 
“I was not afraid, not one drop,” Mr. Iliuk said. “There was just one idea in my head: ‘Run forward.’ ” 
He was wearing a red ski helmet and ski goggles, and carrying a baseball bat attached to a cord looped around his wrist, lest it be knocked out of his hands, which are more accustomed to delicate musical instruments. “All around me, people were wounded because the police had nothing left to do but shoot, and they shot.

Roman Tokar, 31, a lawyer from Zolochiv in western Ukraine who wore an ill-fitting vest of bulbous plastic plates originally intended for dirt-bike riding, said he was continually scared but overcame his fear because of the support he felt from residents of the capital. 
“I can’t drink any more tea, but they keep bringing me tea,” he said. “We are even joking now, telling the women, ‘Stop, you are making the defenders of Maidan fat.’ It’s really pleasant, and we really love these brave girls and even grandmothers who offer us tea.”

Simon in London comments:
Right Sector don't look much like the typical Soros-ite types. 
So if the US/EU backed side actually won in Ukraine, next thing we know the USA/NATO would likely be dropping bombs on their own guys in the cause of Totalitarian Liberalism?     

Hopefully not. But, at minimum, the winds of change in 2014 are blowing fast and they're not blowing in the conventional wisdom's direction.
 

February 21, 2014

Cringely on how H-1B visa fraud is done

Veteran computer journalist Robert X. Cringely writes:
So that’s how H-1B visa fraud is done! 
Reader Mark Surich was looking for a lawyer with Croatian connections to help with a family matter back in the old country. He Googled some candidate lawyers and in one search came up with this federal indictment. It makes very interesting reading and shows one way H-1B visa fraud can be conducted. 
The lawyer under indictment is Marijan Cvjeticanin. Please understand that this is just an indictment, not a conviction. I’m not saying this guy is guilty of anything. My point here is to describe the crime of which he is accused, which I find very interesting. He could be innocent for all I know, but the crime, itself, is I think fairly common and worth understanding. 
Read the indictment. It’s short and quite entertaining. 
The gist of the crime has two parts. First Mr. Cvjeticanin’s law firm reportedly represented technology companies seeking IT job candidates and he is accused of having run on the side an advertising agency that placed employment ads for those companies. That could appear to be a conflict of interest, or at least did to the DoJ. 
But then there’s the other part, in which most of the ads — mainly in Computerworld — seem never to have been placed at all! 
Client companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for employment ads in Computerworld that never even ran! 
The contention of the DoJ in this indictment appears to be that Mr. Cvjeticanin was defrauding companies seeking to hire IT personnel, yet for all those hundreds of ads — ads that for the most part never ran and therefore could never yield job applications — nobody complained! 
The deeper question here is whether they paid for the ads or just for documentation that they had paid for the ads? 
This is alleged H-1B visa fraud, remember. In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job. 
Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates. 
It helps, of course, if nobody actually sees the ads — in this case reportedly hundreds of them. 
When Mr. Cvjeticanin was confronted with his alleged fraudulent behavior,  his defense (according to the indictment) was, “So let them litigate, I’ll show everyone how bogus their immigration applications really are.”   Nice. 
If we follow the logic here it suggests that his belief is that the client companies’ probable H-1B fraud is so much worse than the shenanigans Mr. Cvjeticanin is accused of that those companies won’t dare assist Homeland Security or the DoJ in this case. Who am I to say he’s wrong in that? 
Employers are posting jobs that don’t really exist, seeking candidates they don’t want, and paying for bogus non-ads to show there’s an IT labor shortage in America. Except of course there isn’t an IT labor shortage. 
My old boss Pat McGovern, who owns Computerworld, should be really pissed. 
Pat hates to lose money.
   

The Blues and the Greens

The carnage in Kiev is vaguely reminiscent of the great riots of 532 AD in Constantinople that began at the chariot races when the rival fan clubs, the brawling followers of the Blue and Green racing teams, joined forces and turned on Emperor Justinian the Great. It is perhaps trivializing of the issues at stake in Kiev to point out this connection with Constantinople (which, by the way, converted the Kievan Rus to to Orthodoxy in 969), but this famous story is worth recalling in its own right.

For some reason, this tale is peculiarly appealing to science fiction authors. (The influence of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on sci-fi writers would be an interesting topic: e.g., Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is obviously inspired by Gibbon.)

For most of the 20th Century, historians assumed that the Blues and the Greens of Byzantine Constantinople weren't really just sports fans, but represented the upper class versus the lower class or the religiously orthodox versus the heretical or some neighborhoods versus some other neighborhoods. After all, nobody would get that worked up over sports, would they?

But in the 1970s, historian Alan Cameron, referencing the soccer hooligans of his own day, argued that we shouldn't overlook how important sports were in the Byzantine Empire to young men: "The truth is (of course) that Blues hated the Greens, not because they were lower-class or heretics -- but simply because they were Greens."

But that raises the question of whether sports rivalries can be uncorrelated with other subdivisions of society. Generally, sports rivalries in the modern world correlate with all sorts of demographic traits because they are territorial: teams have their home fields, which tend to attract local fans.

However, the home turf of both the Greens and the Blues was the vast hippodrome in downtown Constantinople.

A vague modern analog might be the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers, who have both played in the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles for the last 15 years.

Traditionally, the Lakers are more successful and more popular, especially with movie stars, but it's not particularly clear that fans of the Lakers or Clippers represent different neighborhoods or classes or ethnicities. The Lakers tend to appeal to Angelenos who like winners and don't mind spending money to associate themselves with winners (i.e., most of them) , while I presume the Clippers appeal to the budget-conscious (the Clippers charge about half as much as the Lakers for the same seat) and those who like underdogs. A marketing plan for the Clips speculates:
The Clippers' current fan base is of a low income bracket, probably young and from out of town, doesn not want to be seen as a bandwagoner, prefers to avoid the mainstream teams and is hoping the Clippers will write a Cinderella story.

On the other hand, the Lakers v. Clippers rivalry is low intensity by the standards of Chicago Cubs v. Chicago White Sox, much less Rangers v. Celtic in Glasgow. One reason for this is the lack of success of the Clippers hasn't generated much loyalty toward them.

Another is that Southern California hasn't been conducive to local sports animosities -- only USC v. UCLA in football generates much heat. Los Angeles Dodger baseball fans, for instance, often root for the Anaheim Angels if they are winning and vaguely wish them well when they aren't. In general, as James Q. Wilson noted after moving from L.A. to Boston in the 1940s to attend Harvard, Angelenos don't have turf, they have cars.

Finally, since enthusiasm (such as it is) for the Clippers has been distributed less regionally or ethnically than psychologically, with the Clippers appealing to random frugal eccentrics, there's not much this rivalry does to tap into human territoriality.

On the other hand, it's hard for me to fathom how the Blues and Greens couldn't come to be correlated with other factors such as class or neighborhood.

Gibbon wrote:
Constantinople adopted the follies, though not the virtues, of ancient Rome; and the same factions which had agitated the circus, raged with redoubled fury in the hippodrome. ...

February 20, 2014

Some great advice for Mark Zuckerberg

A reader comments on my frequent sniping at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us organization that expensively lobbies Congress for more H-1B visas:
I don't know why Steve insists that Zuckerberg is worried about employee salaries. Is there any evidence of that? It seems more likely that he is a true believer in opening the door to "the best and the brightest" by skimming the elite of foreign populations.

There would be a very simple way for Zuckerberg to prove that his immigration lobbying is disinterested: just announce that Facebook will never again use any H-1B visas, either directly or through intermediaries. 

For some reason, though, he hasn't done this.
   

Despite H-1B shortage, Zuckerberg not yet broke

Mark Zuckerberg lobbied Congress all last year for more immigration to keep himself from being driven into poverty by having to pay crushing salaries to American engineers. Yesterday, though, Facebook somehow scrounged together the scratch to acquire a small startup called WhatsApp for $19 billion. A reader comments:
Steve, Nothing to do with Ukraine. Instead, immigration and Silicon Valley. Yesterday, Facebook announced it had acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. WhatsApp had two founders, both former staff software engineers for Yahoo. Amazingly, both tried to get jobs at Facebook, and at least one at Twitter, but neither was hired. Zuckerberg wants to re-engineer the American population in the name of a supposed shortage of "qualified" domestic engineers. And yet Facebook's hiring system is so screwed up, it can't even recognize superb, highly experienced, U.S. citizen software engineers when they walk in the door asking for a job. They could've had the founders for maybe $100K/yr each. Instead, they ended up paying $19B. And we're supposed to trust this guy's opinion on whether there are enough good engineers? Unbelievable. Please write about this. Spread the word.

Actually, it does have a connection to Ukraine. While Brian Acton is American-born, Joseph Koum was born a Ukrainian Jew and came here 22 years ago as a teen. 

Perhaps one reason these two guys couldn't get hired by Facebook is because they are so old: Koum is 38 and Acton 42.
 
You might almost think that America isn't quite as bereft of talent as Mr. Zuckerberg's flacks tell Congress it is. If Zuckerberg doesn't get more H-1B visas out of Congress, he might even be forced to hire as programmers Elderly-Americans like Koum and Acton, or even Female-Americans, like corporations did back in the 20th Century.
    

Ukraine

From the New York Times on this morning's fighting in Kiev, Ukraine:
The fighting shattered a truce declared just hours earlier. Just after dawn, young men in ski masks opened a breach in their barricade near a stage on the square, ran across a hundred yards of smoldering debris and surged toward riot police officers who were firing at them with shotguns. 
Protesters pushed back the police in a continual racket of gunshots and by around 10 a.m. had recaptured the entire square, but at the cost of creating a scene of mayhem. 
The fighting left bodies lined up on a sidewalk, makeshift clinics crammed with the bloody wounded, and sirens and gunfire ringing through the center of the city. 
The demonstrators captured at least several dozen policemen, whom they marched, dazed and bloodied, toward the center of the square through a crowd of men who heckled and shoved them. 
“There will be many dead today,” Anatoly Volk, 38, one of the demonstrators, said. He was watching stretchers carry dead and wounded men down a stairway slick with mud near the Hotel Ukraina. 
Mr. Volk said the protesters had decided to try to retake the square because they believed a truce announced around midnight was a ruse. The young men in ski masks who led the push, he said, believed it was a stalling maneuver by President Viktor F. Yanukovych, to buy time to deploy troops in the capital after discovering that the civilian police had insufficient forces to clear the square. 
“A truce means real negotiations,” Mr. Volk said. “They are just delaying to make time to bring in more troops. They didn’t have the forces to storm us last night. So we are expanding our barricades to where they were before. We are restoring what we had.”

This will sound absurdly pollyannaish, but there's a small hope that these apocalyptic Mad Max scenes from Kiev's theater of insane bravery might lay the foundations for a true Ukrainian nation to emerge years hence. 

Europe between Warsaw and Moscow lagged behind Western Europe in developing effective nationalism, and continues to pay the price for its nationalism-deficit in looting by elites. Yet, nationalism, although it has its pragmatic benefits, isn't wholly based on rational cost-benefit analysis. It needs legends and heroes. 

And there are no shortage of volunteers in Kiev.
  
In the best case scenario, both sides somehow emerge ennobled, as the roots of world-beating American unity from 1898-1963 were laid at Gettysburg.

In the worst case scenario ...