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By Michael F. Duggan

The first thing you have to realize is that the giant panda is an absurdity of natural selection.¹ It is a carnivore reverse-engineered into a clawed-and-fanged herbivore with a dietary niche limited to bamboo, a staple so nutritionally desolate, that the creature is reduced to spending its days on its back, stripping and eating leaves.

But the panda has one overwhelming advantage over so many other endangered animals: it is what is called a “charismatic” species. In other words, it is a fluffy, photogenic, teddybear-like animal that appeals—panders (sorry)—to a deeply-rooted human instinct for cute things. To be fair, with 1,500 to 3,000 individuals in the wild, the giant panda is not a robust species, and is listed as “vulnerable.” Because of habitat destruction, its range is limited to the bamboo mountain forests of the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. They are a precious rarity (they are so valuable, that whenever there was a public relations “panda naming” contest, I favored the moniker “Cha-Ching”). It’s just a shame that the Yangtze dolphin and turtle, now both likely extinct, were apparently not charismatic enough to be diplomatically valuable species, the former falling victim to, among other things, the Three Gorges Dam.² So much for bio-altruism.

But back to the Chinese teddybears. All of this, the rarity of the panda, its universally-acknowledged adorability, and its uniqueness to China, all made it a natural for zoological diplomacy. The original exchange pandas were brought to the United States in 1972, just as U.S.-China relations were thawing. Although the returning of Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji  to China is due to the expiration of the exchange lease, what can we infer from it more generally in diplomatic terms? And what does panda diplomacy hold for the future?

Notes
1. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb.
2. https://news.mongabay.com/2007/08/extinction-of-the-yangtze-river-dolphin-is-confirmed/

By Michael F. Duggan

Who would have thought that Hezbollah would the voice of reason in the Middle East? For while Hassan Nasrallah threw out a lot of predictable red meat to the crowd today, he did not call for a wider war.

Beyond the bluster, and reading between the lines, Nasrallah is giving Israel, the United States, and the world a chance to pull back from the brink. It was a warning, but it is also a window, an expression of restraint that should be met with an equal measure of sanity and realism. It is a signal from the other side, like Khrushchev’s message of October 26, 1962 to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. By not calling for an expanded war against Israel, a war that would set the Middle East and the rest of the world on fire, Nasrallah has provided an opportunity for deescalation.

I suspect that nobody in the Israeli government reads this blog. But if they did, I would advise them to look at the bigger picture, the long game, and to stop taking the bait. There is no plausible military solution to this crisis, and the killing of civilians in Gaza and sending IDF troops into this Stalingrad on the Mediterranean is exactly what Hamas wants Israel to do.

By Michael F. Duggan

Forty years ago, at little past 7:00 on the rainy evening of October 23, 1983, Jessica Savitch left the Chez Odette restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with Martin Fischbein, vice president of the New York Post. Fischbein was driving and exited the wrong way out of the parking lot and down the towpath of the Pennsylvania Canal on the Delaware River. There were no guardrails along the canal and the car flipped over the edge, falling 15 feet upside-down into four or five feet of water. Sinking in the mud, the car doors of were effectively sealed. Unable to get out, Fischbein (who was knocked unconscious), Savitch, and her Siberian husky, Chewy, drowned.

Savitch had been NBC’s “Golden Girl”—the gold standard for the female broadcast news reporter of the late 1970s and early eighties and one of the first women to anchor a nightly network news program. On the air, she projected charm, competence, and confidence and was unflappable. But stories abounded of a private life in turmoil, including a failed marriage, drug use, and the suicide of her second husband, Dr. Ronald Payne. There were also stories that she was a perfectionist who was difficult to work with. In spite of the stories of substance abuse, the autopsies showed that Fishbein and Savitch had had no more than a single glass of wine between them at dinner.

During a live 60-second top-of-the-hour news update on October 3, 1983, she slurred her words and was clearly off her game. This led to speculation that her career was in crisis and perhaps over at NBC (even though she had supposedly signed a contract for another year at the network and was also hosting the new PBS news magazine Frontline). She would do a flawless news spot later than night and then over the coming days and weeks.

There is something especially somber about people now long gone but who live in memory as living memory recedes. It is as if they will be soon forever lost even there. Perhaps this is the natural course of things. Eventually we will all be forgotten. Except for a couple of tell-all books and a movie based on one of them, Savitch seems mostly forgotten these days. The killing of 241 Marines in Beirut on the same day, followed by the invasion of Grenada, all but wiped the news of her death off of the headlines. Rather than sympathy, the tragedy and sorrow of her life became ammunition for resentful stories.

I couldn’t care less about the gossip, rumors, or even the truth about Savitch’s private life and personal problems. Insofar as memory persists, she deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of a generation of women reporters, now retired or late into their careers, that include Linda Ellerbee and Judy Woodruff.

Savitch and Chewy were cremated together and their ashes were scattered into the ocean at Atlantic City. She has no headstone.

By Michael F. Duggan

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
-Jake Sullivan, September 29, 2023

The Hamas attacks in Israel this weekend are as shocking in their scale, scope, sophistication, and operational success as they are horrifying in terms of civilian losses. Israel appears to have been caught off guard in what looks like a Middle Eastern version of the Tet Offensive, the coordinated nationwide attacks in South Vietnam during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 1968. Many hundreds of people have been killed and wounded on both sides. Scores of Israeli civilians were taken hostage.

I am sympathetic to the Palestinian people and know of their plight and despair. But this wave of attacks by Hamas will only initiate another round of insanity in the region. Could that be the goal? The attacks seem as self-destructive as they were murderous. Now Israel will bring down a ferocious wrath upon them—a payback for a payback—and more civilians will die.

The Gaza will bear the brunt of the initial retaliation even though there are Israeli hostages being held there. An overreaction is what Hamas wants. What are the prospects of an Israeli victory if they invade a city with a population greater than Baltimore (more than 590,000 in Gaza City with a total of more than 2 million in the Gaza Strip) with infantry, and what will happen to the hostages if they do? One can only wonder how they will respond on the West Bank. The impact of the new war on the power structure and relations of the Middle East can only be guessed at. What is the possibility of a wider regional war? Will Hezbollah get involved? Will Syria? Iran? And all at a time when relations between Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia appeared to be heading in the right direction. It has also pushed Ukraine out of the headlines.

The Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group is on its way to the eastern Mediterranean.

Although the nature of existence is poorly understood, I tend toward Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds” model, postulating the realms of the physical, the cognitive, and the ideational.¹ Consciousness arises from physical (electrochemical) processes, and we can consciously interact with ideas. The questions is whether the physical or ideational is primal or if they require each other. The fact that the physical world runs on what seem to be finely-calibrated relationships and laws is striking, although possibly an accident via cosmological natural selection.²

Whenever I feel that there might be a “mathematician” behind the laws and “just six numbers” that make the cosmos work, I think of what a friend of mine observed about pi, the fact that the ratio behind the beauty and simplicity of a circle is a repeating, irrational number, a number that goes on forever.

Notes
¹²

1. Karl Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,” Objective Knowledge, 1972 (1968), 106-152. ↩︎
2. See generally, Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos. ↩︎

By Michael F. Duggan

With twenty battle stars, the USS Enterprise is the most highly decorated U.S. warship of the Second World War. Many, perhaps most, Americans associate its name with a fictional spaceship. Between 57 million and 97 million people are estimated to have died in the World Wars, and yet many, perhaps most, Americans associate the term stormtrooper with fictional, anonymous soldiers from the Star Wars franchise. Rocky Marciano was the only undefeated world heavyweight boxing champion winning 49 out of 49 fights, 43 by knockout, and was never fought to a draw. And yet most Americans associate the name with a fictional fighter played by Sylvester Stallone.

Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were among the front row of Renaissance painters. Except for art and art history majors, a generation or two of Americans associate these names with anthropomorphized cartoon turtles. In terms of volume, the Amazon is the largest river on Earth and its basin is the most biologically diverse region of the planets. And yet a simple Google search of “Amazon” did not provide a single result for the river and its basin among the top 20 hits. A result for a WWF site the Amazon came in at 21.

I will let these observations speak for themselves.

By Michael F. Duggan

In an essay titled “Fog of War brought Down to Life” (September 4), Gilbert Doctorow suggests that even the most informed of us—a category to which I do not include myself—really have little idea of what is happening on the front lines in Ukraine. At least that is how I read it.

Western news sources point out Russian mistakes and miscalculations, poor equipment, bad morale, and incompetent leadership, and yet they devised a defensive line in depth that stopped the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive. Some independent, realist, and pro-Russian sources predicted the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, huge casualty rates, shortages of Ukrainian reserves and artillery shells, and a grinding Russian counter-counteroffensive leading to victory in late summer or fall. And yet is late summer and Ukraine is still punching hard and fighting back with great intensity.

Scott Ritter stands by his prediction of a Russian strategic victory over the coming month or two, and Western media sources are heartened by the apparent breakthrough by Ukrainian forces in the area around Robotyne and Verbove. What seems certain is that something will give, somewhere. The alternative is an “ugly” Russian victory and/or a never-ending frozen conflict that is like a larger and more active version of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas. Ukraine may end up as “Korea West” in the new Cold War.

By Michael F. Duggan

America’s favorite epicurean billionaire is gone at 76. He wrote some fun songs, and created and guarded a branding empire like a Gilded Age robber baron.

I was ambivalent about Buffett’s music, briefly embracing at fleeting moments during fleeting summers in my twenties, and I am sure that I knew some Parrot Heads. It was certainly a background mainstay of laidback summer drinking events at the shore. A lot of his songs are about drinking and now seem self-indulgent, self-centered, and even self-pitying (“A Pirate turns 40”).

But beyond a Dionysian celebration of drinking rum and braggadocio about the high-octane escapist lifestyle, what is there? Among his Greatest Hits are a couple of decent breakup/makeup songs (“Come Monday,” “Miss You so Badly”), and a few novelty songs (“Cheeseburger in Paradise,” Pencil-Thin Mustache,” “Why Don’t We get Drunk?”, and that really silly one about the volcano). This hardly puts him up there with Dylan or Lennon and McCartney, much less the Gershwin’s or T.S. Eliot. As a friend of mine pointed out, his most soulful song, one that is not about himself, may be “He Went to Paris,” which is thoughtful, sympathetic, and bittersweet.

He had a knack for melody, although sometimes they run together a little. But in general, Buffett seemed to be mostly about Buffett, and I suspect the appeal, beyond the facial allure of tropical carousing, was the fact that we could put ourselves in his shoes by singling along with him (if The Simpsons is to be believed, he did not let people cover his songs). Perhaps I am overthinking it and should take his music for what it is as a not insignificant contribution to the songbook of American summer vacation.

It seems fitting that he left us at the end of summer on Labor Day Friday.

By Michael F. Duggan

Last week the Ukrainian Ground Forces took the village of Robotyne on the Russian front lines along the Tomak-Melitopol axis in Zaporizhzhia. The town appears to have been destroyed and one wonders if the destruction was entirely due to extremely heavy fighting, or if it was pre-targeted as a likely objective of the counteroffensive, or both. The next town in the direction of Tomak is Novoprokopivka, a short distance to the south.

But rather than attacking this town directly, Ukrainian forces appear to be using a flanking operation from the east in order to envelope or else bypass it. They appear to be moving southeast by the left flank, toward the town of Verbove. Reports from both sides indicate that advanced elements of the elite Ukrainian 82nd Airmobile Brigade, which until recently had been held in reserve, have breached the initial Russian lines of tank traps and minefields by securing a road into the town. At this point, the Ukrainians may be holding the northwest part of Verbove.

When a combined arms operation breaches the initial lines of a defense-in-depth, it has either found a chink in the enemy armor—a corridor through which it may more easily pass—or it has stumbled into a shaping zone with presighted artillery traps. The Ukrainian Ground Forces have penetrated the grey zone to a depth of roughly four miles, creating an impressive salient. At this point, the Ukrainians and the West are measuring success in terms of territory taken while the Russians appear to be fighting an attritional war. It is Jomini versus von Clausewitz.

Advances in territory have to be measure against what military men call burn rates—casualties, losses of vehicles and materiel, and the expenditures of munitions, especially artillery shells. These rates must then be measured against, not only the ground gained, but the capacity of both sides to sustain and replace such losses. Measuring success in terms of territory gained (a Jominian approach to tactics, operations, and strategy) can be misleading, unless such gains signify a game-changing breakthrough or an all out collapse of the enemy lines.

But what is really going on? What is real? Accurate information is difficult to come by and all of these observations are conjectural and based on control maps and other publicly-available online sources. It is in the interest of both sides to lie about casualties. Questions abound: Have the Ukrainians found a genuine weak point in the Russian lines that they are now effectively exploiting? Have they created a breach through which armor and mechanized infantry can now be rammed through with momentum toward objectives deeper into Russian-held territory with a strategic goal of cutting a swath to the Sea of Azov? Did they really avoid the worst of Russian defenses—tank traps, dragon’s teeth, and minefields—by securing a road leading directly into a likely objective? If so, why was this approach not more heavily defended by the Russians? Was it, as Western news outlets are reporting, less guarded so as to allow Russians to pull back quickly, and, if so, was it intended as a Russian escape route, or a means to draw the in the Ukrainians? Time will tell.

These may be real gains—the attackers have gained ground. The Ukrainians may be exploiting a weak point in the Russian defenses, or, given that they have only breached the foremost Russian lines, it could be an artillery trap. After all, why would the Russians allow a weak point along a vector running near a succession of strategic towns, but one that also directs the attackers away from that line? Deception is a first principle of war.

Robotyne is about 18 miles from Tokmak and around 54 miles from Melitopol. The sea is a little beyond Melitopol.

By Michael F. Duggan

BRICS, an emerging alternative to the G20, appears to be coming of age.

In the new and more conspicuously multipolar world—and the Second Cold War—the two primary poles of the US/West and Russia/China/Iran will be increasingly competing for the favor and resources of the third pole, a loosely aggregated league of mostly free agent states of the Global South (“BRICS” stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the league may prove attractive to much of the developing world). Looks like China and Russia intend to beat the West to the punch.

Take special note of the 15th annual BRICS summit that was held this past week in Johannesburg. Although there is currently no talk about supplanting the Dollar with the Yuan as the world reserve currency (or as a competitive alternative to the Dollar), it seems likely that if the world were to significantly de-dollarized, the US could find itself in the Great Depression II or something even worse.

Some commentators have observed that the sanctions the West has placed on Russia has had the effect of de-dollarazation parts of the world economy, and that the war in Ukraine is driving the decline of Western economic dominance. The sullen response to the war by many of the nations of the South would seem to corroborate this. Worse yet, the new and less cooperative world order is coming at a time when unity is needed, when the cooperation of China, Russia, and the Global South’s will be necessary to combat the unfolding crises of the environment.

It’s all starting to look like a Shakespearean tragedy writ large.