Bizarro World

It is a common refrain these days that liberals and conservatives live in different worlds.  These two segments of our population often have "polar opposite" views about what is true.  Both sides say about the other "for them up is down, black is white, and true is false".  I want to talk about a specific instance where this scenario is what's playing out.  Liberals and conservatives now see key events in Ukraine so differently that there is almost no commonality.

One way to characterize this situation is to make reference to "Bizarro World".  Most people get the reference even though it dates back to before a lot of us (but not me) were born.  You see, Bizarro World is a comic book invention.  More specifically, it comes from the fantasy world Superman occupies in what we now call "the DC Universe".

The "DC" stands for Detective Comics, an early comic book line from a company with a boring name.  Times change and Detective Comics got short handed to DC and the company decided to rename itself.  Today, most people are familiar with the DC "universe" and the Marvel "universe", for instance.  Dedicated fans can lay out the parameters of one of these fantasy worlds in obsessive detail.  But even the most casual observer knows that Superman and Batman anchor the DC universe.  And it is to the elaborate fantasy world DC built around Superman in the '60s to which we owe the invention of Bizarro World.

Turning out an issue a month in a dozen or so lines of comics is exhausting.  You quickly burn through all the variations on idea after idea after idea.  The desperation born out of this crushing reality spawned Bizarro World.  The code that governs this world is "us do opposite of all Earthly things.  Us hate beauty!  Us love ugliness!  Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World".  In a word, change up to down, black to white, true to false, etc., and see if you can come up with a fun story to put into a comic book.

The DC writers had great success with this.  They created an anti-Earth that was cube shaped instead of spherical.  They populated it with an anti-Superman, and so on.  It was a success in that it spawned a whole bunch of stories that could be used to fill up a whole bunch of pages of comic book after comic book.  And it was very popular with readers.

As a result of this sustained popularity "Bizarro" and "Bizarro World" became concepts that became a regular part of popular culture.  People who would not be caught dead within a mile of a comic book or a comic book store knew what the terms meant.

And that's where we stand with some fundamental assumptions about Ukraine now.  Both sides now see the other side as pushing a Bizarro World narrative on the subject.  But before I go into that I want to explore the question:  is a Bizarro World even possible?  Sure, it works in a comic book.  There the author can hide any problems and dodge around any inconsistencies.  The readers suspend disbelief and go along with it if the story and the situation are fun.  But what about the real world?

Let's start with a real world example that was explored fictionally about a hundred and fifty years ago, the "Looking-Glass" world.  In 1871 Lewis Carol published a sequel to his wildly popular "Alice in Wonderland" called "Alice through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There".   The launching point for the story was the observation that if you look through a mirror, the less pretentions word we now use instead of "Looking-Glass", then we see a Bizarro world.  Behind the Looking-Glass what is on the right in the real world becomes on the left and vice versa.

Lewis started with that idea, posited that Alice could somehow enter this world by stepping through the Looking-Glass, and went on from there.  The world residing on the other side of the Looking-Glass looks pretty much like the real world.  But that world often contains doors.  What is beyond the door we see in the in the Looking-Glass World?  Carol posited that a quite bizarre world might be found there, just beyond what we could see from the real world.  And that's what most of the book concerns itself with.  And it does so in a very delightful manner.

Confining ourselves, for the moment, to what we can observe of the Looking-Glass world from the real world, we can make some observations about the rules that govern that specific Bizarro World.  Not everything is different.  In the part we can see, left and right are switched but up stays up, down stays down, and near and far stay near and far.  In other words, there is only the one change.

That's true, at least, of the parts of the Looking-Glass World that we can observe.  In theory it is possible that the parts that extend beyond the parts we can observe can have many additional differences.  We can't see there and, unlike Alice, we can't go there, so we have no way of finding out.  Carol's ability to invent many entertaining additional differences and place them in that terra incognita is what makes the book fun.

But the Looking-Glass World is fictitious.  Are there Bizarro Worlds that actually exist?  The answer turns out to be yes!  Imagine a short video of two pucks caroming off of each other on an air hockey table.  The red puck comes in from the left.  The white puck comes in from the right.  They collide in the middle and each recoils back the way it came.  Imagine watching this video.  Now ask yourself this:  is the video being run forwards or backwards?

It turns out you can't tell.  That's because the basic physics on display is "time invariant".  The laws work the same whether time runs forward from the past to the future or runs backward from the future to the past.

This is known in physics as the "time's arrow" problem.  Which way does time's arrow point and can we prove it?  And in most situations with most of the law of physics, the answer is no.  You can't tell which direction time flows in.  The laws of physics are exactly the same regardless of which way time's arrow points.

So we have a Bizarro World situation.  With respect to time's arrow we can't tell whether we are in the "real" world where time's arrow points from the past to the future, or the Bizarro World where time's arrow points from the future to the past.  But it turns out that there is a solution to this particular problem.

Imagine you have a big glass jar and two equal sized bags of jelly beans.  One bag is full of red jelly beans and the other bag is full of black ones.  Now pour first the red then the black bag into the jar.  At this point you will have a layer of red beans on the bottom and a layer of black ones on top of it.  Now stir the jar up.  Soon all the beans will be mixed together.

If you make a video of all this it will be obvious which way the video is running when you later play it back.  If layers of red and black beans merge into a mix the video is being run forward.  If a mix of beans resolves itself into a layer of red and a layer of black, the video is being run backwards.  What's going on here is something called entropy.

Entropy is a measure of chaos.  In general, as time passes in a forward direction the universe moves from a state of low entropy (everything is ordered) to a state of higher entropy (everything is chaotic).  The jar with two layers of beans is more ordered.  The jar with everything stirred together is more chaotic.

Now science has a whole scheme for measuring order and chaos and for calculating the amount of entropy a system contains.  But the details are complicated so I am going to skip over them.  I will note, however, that once the beans are mixed up you can keep stirring the jar as long as you want.  The beans are not going to settle out into layers no matter how long you continue to stir.

Returning to our air hockey table.  If we widen our shot and shoot video for longer we will eventually be able to figure out which way the tape is running.  If the pucks start out going quickly and, after bouncing around for a while, slow down and eventually stop then the tape is running forward.

If the pucks start out not moving but then start moving and then go faster and faster as the tape plays then it is running backwards.  Air hockey tables are low friction devices.  But they still have some friction.  And friction is an entropy increasing phenomenon.  So entropy measurements tell us which way time's arrow points.

Similarly, we have all kinds of particles and anti-particles.  If we replace particles with anti-particles and watch what happens it turns out the same thing happens as would happen if they were particles.  The laws of physics work the same for particles and anti-particles.  We can't tell a set of particles interacting among themselves from a set of anti-particles interacting among themselves.  So which is real and which is Bizarro?

As far is physicists can tell, there's no way to tell.  What they can say is that what we think of as the "real" universe is 99+% made of particles and contains only small trace amounts of anti-particles.  If a particle meets its anti-particle they both get changed into a nothing but lot of energy.  So if you have an "electron" and you want to know whether its a particle (electron) or an anti-particle (positron), try to hit it with something you know for sure is an electron.  If they avoid each other the "electron" actually is an electron.  If both particles get replaced by a flash of energy then it was a positron.

But deciding that what, for the most part, makes up the mater in our universe is particles and not anti-particles is a convenient but arbitrary decision.  Scientific observations tell us that it's almost all the same class of stuff.  Physics does not tell us which class of stuff it is.  If everything switched to the other class we wouldn't notice anything different.  We chose to call the situation we are familiar with the "real" version and a hypothetical situation where everything got switched the Bizarro version.  But there is no factual basis for this choice, only convenience.

Here is what at first appears to be a similar situation.  Benjamin Franklin figured out that electricity came in two opposite flavors.  Like particles and anti-particles, opposites attract and annihilate each other.  Each kind on its own is repelled by more of that same kind.  With nothing to go on, Franklin picked one kind at random and decided it was "positive" electricity and, therefore, the other kind was "negative" electricity.  But, now that we know more, we know that Franklin got it wrong.

In many circumstances electricity acts like a fluid.  And in most cases that fluid is composed of electrons, negatively charged particles.  So it is natural to think of electricity as flowing from positive to negative.  But in almost all cases, what is actually flowing, is flowing from negative to positive.

With electricity there is a way to tell which is the normal direction of flow and which is the Bizarro direction.  And Franklin chose the Bizarro one.  Engineers and scientists have long since figured all this out.  Sometimes it makes a difference and they make the appropriate adjustment.  Sometimes it doesn't and they just get on with it.

I wanted to run through a number of actual examples of "real world" versus "Bizarro World" in order to highlight something that is true of all Bizarro Worlds that can actually exist.  In each case going back to the Looking-Glass one, there is a specific rule as to how you do the "reverse" necessary to switch from "real" to "Bizarro".  But, what is even more important, sometime you can tell which is the real world that actually exists and which is the Bizarro one that is only make believe.

In the Looking-Glass World you switch left with right but leave everything else the same.  In "time's arrow" case, most of the time you can't tell which direction time is flowing.  But you can if you observe a system's entropy.  Pretty much everything else stays the same.

In the particle - anti-particle case, all the quantum attributes of the "particle" have to be flipped so that a particle anti-particle collision results in everything being converted to pure energy.  That means that for any attribute like spin, that can't be converted to energy, the particle and anti-particle must have exactly opposite amounts of that attribute.  Both particles can have a positive amont of mass because mass can be converted to energy.

If we look at the Bizarro World of the comic books we quickly see that those worlds are not actually possible.  Suspension of disbelief is necessary.  For instance, it turns out that gravity on Bizarro World works pretty much they way it does in the real world.  And that means that a cubical planet the same size as Earth is not possible.  But it still make for a fun story.  With that as background, let's move on to Ukraine.

Here's a quick history of Ukraine.  For a long time Ukraine was one of the "republics" that made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.  When it came to U. N. seats, they were each an independent country.  But Russia ran the whole show so, for the most part, they were a single country.

Then the USSR fell part into it s constituent pieces in about 1990.  At that point Ukraine became an independent country in actuality, and not just when it was convenient for the Russians to pretend it was.  But, as part of its history, Ukraine inherited a bunch of nuclear power reactors, four of which were located at Chernobyl.  One of them blew up and made a big mess.  The others are still running.

Ukraine also inherited a bunch of nuclear bombs.  In a complicated dance orchestrated with the help of Russia and the US, these were disposed of and Ukraine became a non-nuclear power.  For a few years Ukraine was able to operate relatively autonomously.  It was the Ukrainians who, on their own, decided that they wanted to denuclearize.

But about ten years ago Putin decided he wanted more influence on (and control of) how things worked there.  So he managed to get his puppets installed into all the top Ukrainian government positions.  The government was extremely corrupt because it was to Putin's advantage that it be corrupt.

Starting in 2013 the Ukrainians revolted and eventually managed to toss the Putin toadies out.  But this left a fragile country behind.  And initially only the top of the government changed.  That left a corrupt, incompetent, and inefficient bureaucracy still in chare of day to day operations.  The Ukrainian populous wanted the corruption cleaned up but this was hard to do due to its pervasiveness.  But efforts were begun immediately.

And almost immediately the Russians staged a military operation that changed control of a peninsula called Crimea from Ukrainian authority to Russian authority.  The Russians invested only a modest amount of effort in pretending that this was anything other than a simple power grab.  But nobody was well positioned to do much about it.  Sanctions were imposed but that was it.

Shortly after that, the Russians also invaded two eastern province of Ukraine.  Again, only a modest effort was made to disguise the fact that this was a straight forward power grab by the Russians.  Again, nobody was in a position to do much about it except ramp the sanctions up a couple of notches.  Putin would very much like all the sanctions lifted.

So, starting in 2014 and continuing ever since, Ukraine has been involved in a war with Russia.  It is very much a "hot" war.  People in uniforms with serious military hardware are shooting at each other.  The number of soldiers on each side is modest compared to some other wars.  But it is very much a big deal as far as the Ukrainians are concerned.

At the same time Ukraine has been trying to get their act together and root out corruption.  A key figure in this latter campaign has been Viktor Shokin.  His job was to root out corruption and prosecute it.  But instead he was wildly ineffective.  He was seen as protecting key figures involved in corruption rather than going after him.  He was finally booted out and replaced by someone who has been doing a much better job.

Ukraine has had two elections since 2013, a remarkable feat given what has been going on there.  Even more remarkably, both have been widely seen as fair.  The 2019 election put Volodymyr Zelensky into power.  He has a background in show business and promised to accelerate efforts to deal with corruption.  He got 73% of the vote.  One reason for his popularity was that he was seen as being outside the traditional power structure.  Voters believed his outsider status would make it easier to deal effectively with corruption.

So that's how Ukraine got to where it now is.  Meanwhile, in the US there was a consensus about Ukraine.  Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the pre-2013 situation was bad.  Both Democrats and Republicans saluted the ouster of the Putin supported regime in 2014.  Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Russian behavior in Ukraine must not be tolerated.

So various sanctions were imposed on Russia in an attempt to punish them.  These sanctions received bipartisan support.  Both parties saluted the ouster of Shokin.  Both parties have been broadly supportive of both military and economic aid to Ukraine.  For a long thime this consensus held.

But over the last couple of years that consensus has broken down.  What has changed is that Donald Trump is now President.  And Donald Trump is unabashedly pro-Russia in general and pro-Putin in particular.  He has worked assiduously to get the sanctions imposed on Russia as a results of their actions against Ukraine removed.  This has necessitated a rethinking of the whole Ukraine situation.

Here is the current official line from the Trump Administration:

1. Shokin was not doing an incompetent job and actually interfering with attempts to root out corruption.  Instead, he was an effective corruption fighter who has been smeared.  A part of the successful smear was perpetrated by then Vice President Joe Biden.  He was helped by his son, Hunter, who was working in Ukraine at the time.
2. The current government has been insufficiently aggressive at going after corruption and needs to be goaded into doing more by any means necessary.
3. In 2016 there was a group operating in Ukraine that successfully implemented a disinformation campaign.  They were the ones responsible for the hacking of DNC mail servers and other foreign election interference.  But they succeeded in fooling people into believing it was the Russians.  The Russians were totally innocent of any wrongdoing.
4. The Ukrainian government should quickly come to some kind of agreement with the Russians.  The agreement would cede territory that Russia has expropriated and end the war.  The agreement should not require the Russians to accept any blame or otherwise be stigmatized.
5. As a result of the previous item it makes complete sense to remove all of the sanctions placed on Russia, Russian government officials, and Putin associates.  The sanctions would no longer serve any useful purpose.

Most of this represents a clean break with previous Republican thinking on the subject.  Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers saluted the ouster of Shokin at the time.  Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers supported imposing all of the Ukraine-related sanctions currently in place against Russia.  Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been supportive of Ukrainian efforts to root out corruption.  But that represents past GOP thinking and does not represent current GOP thinking in the Trump era.

It represents a Bizarro World when compared to either current Democratic thinking or past Republican thinking on the subject.  So who's living in a Bizarro World, Democrats or Republicans?  As my examples above showed, sometimes you can tell and sometimes you can't.  This is a case where you can tell which is real and which is Bizarro.

The way you do this is to carefully determine what is known and what is knowable.  And if we do that, the current Republican position quickly falls apart.  When it comes to corruption "follow the money" almost always works.

Paul Manafort (now in prison for various Federal offenses and likely to be convicted in State court for more) worked in Ukraine up to 2013.  He ended up making a lot of money supporting the old corrupt regime.  Anyone like Shokin, who was closely aligned with the old regime, should be viewed with suspicion.  Joe Biden was conspicuously living a modest lifestyle and still does.  And there is no evidence of any big stash of cash around.  Roughly the same thing seems to be true with respect to his son, Hunter.

Before Trump came into office there was a consensus that Shokin was a bad dude.  No evidence has surfaces since to indicate that was wrong.  Instead there is substantial evidence that the corruption situation has improved noticeably since then.  Is it as good as people would like?  No, but the current Ukrainian government is the first to admit that.

The DNC mail serves were hacked.  The DNC hired a company called Crowdstrike to figure out who did it.  They provided substantial evidence that it was the Russians.  The US intelligence community agreed.  As do others who have looked into this.

The Mueller Report provided substantial additional evidence of Russian efforts directed at the 2016 election.  No one has found any credible evidence of any Ukrainian based efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.  Instead this is a conspiracy theory found in the dark recesses of the Internet.  The originators of this theory are long on rhetoric and short on checkable evidence.

The Russian military has engaged in two different actions aimed at Ukraine.  The first one resulted in Russia taking complete control of Crimea.  The second action is still ongoing and the conflict area is currently characterized as an active war zone.  Russia has provided no credible justification for either action.  It is clear that Russia has grabbed territory from Ukraine by force because it could.  The Russians are the bad guys.

Since then they have taken no action that would justify the reduction of any sanctions.  Yet the Trump Administration has removed sanctions from one of Putin's pet Oligarchs.  The Trump Administration has provided no justification for this move.  They did it because they could.  (Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, have refused to override Trump vetoes that would have reversed this and other pro-Russian moves the Trump Administration has made.)

The Trump Administration has made many moves aimed at eliminating various Ukraine related sanctions on Russia, Putin, and his associates.  For the most part, it has been a bridge too far for congressional Republicans to go along with removing them.  So, most of them remain in place.

Let me finish by reviewing the real situation, the one espoused by Democrats:

1. Shokin was a bad guy who was enabling corruption rather than fighting it.  The Biden's were right to do what they could to help get him kicked out.  They did not benefit, financially or otherwise, from that action.
2. The current Ukrainian Administration has been trying to do what it can to reduce corruption.  They are being opposed by internal forces within Ukraine who benefit from the corruption.  They are also being vigorously opposed by Putin.  Rather than being helpful, the Trump administration is muddying the waters.  Under the guise of corruption reduction (a subject the Administration has shown no interest in in any other country) the Trump Administration has been actively hindering Ukrainian efforts to reduce corruption.
3. The Administration has done this by holding Shokin up as a hero when he is actually a villian.
4. The Administration has also done this by holding up aid because (a) the Europeans aren't contributing enough and/or (b) claiming the Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts are misdirected.  They should be aimed at the Biden family rather than where they are currently aimed.
5. The Administration also believes that a proper investigation would turn up the Ukrainian based plot to disrupt the 2106 US election.  But this has been competently investigated before and no credible evidence of a Ukrainian based plot has surfaced.  Believing in this plot also requires ignoring the vast amount of data pointing to Russia instead of Ukraine.  [The following additional text was added on 10/8/2019]  And the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report saying, in effect, that "the Russians did it".  The report was approved along bipartisan lines.  It was issued by the Republican majority and endorsed by the Democratic minority.  In a second report issued after this post was initially published they came to the identical conclusion.  This report was also issued in the same bipartisan manner.  The first report outlined the case for Russian meddling.  The second report focused on Russian efforts channeled through social media.  [End of added material]  
6. Even if you believe in the Ukrainian plot to disrupt the 2016 US election (which you should not) then the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still ongoing.  So there is still no reason to relax the sanctions.  They should instead be strengthened.

In summary, the Bizarro World created to justify Trump Administration actions with respect to Ukraine is even less credible than the Bizarro World comic book writers dreamed up in the '60s.  And they weren't looking for a scenario that anyone would believe was real.  All they wanted to do was to come up with a story that was a fun fantasy to indulge in.

But Trump and his Republican supporters are deadly serious.  They want their supporters to believe that what they have come up with is actually true.  (They also want their supporters to believe several other Bizarro Worlds are real.)  Unfortunately, unlike comic book readers of the '60s who knew it was all a fantasy, far too many of his supporters can no longer tell where fantasy ends and reality begins.

[Note:  Additional text was added on 10/9/2019 to item 5 of "the real situation" listed above.  No material was changed or deleted.]