In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

One of the big things that strikes me about the current Ukraine war is how legacy media, especially in the US, has failed to cover it. There is neither an Edward R Murrow nor a Bernard Shaw in Kyiv. UK media has been somewhat better, but the best reports are from a combinationi of third-world outlets, independent YouTubers, and even the Ukraine government news agency. Ukraine in particular is running material without contradiction from the Russians: Ukraine has paraded captured Russian soldiers in dozens of online videos as Moscow finally admitted its forces have sustained heavy losses after pictures showing bodies of Kremlin fighters emerged. Footage posted online show tied up 'demoralised and exhausted' Russian prisoners of war captured after they failed to break through Ukrainian defences in Kyiv and Kharkiv over the weekend. Several of the videos were posted on a Telegram channel set up on Saturday by Ukraine's Interior Ministry called 'Find Your Own'...

When I was in graduate school, I studied with professors who styled themselves Aristotelians, but in hindsight, they were just poseurs. When I became Catholic and began to look seriously at Aquinas, I began to understand how a real Aristotelian thinks, but at the same time, I realized that I actually began thinking as a real Aristotelian when I left graduate school and went into tech. A good Aristotelian looks for causes. One of the first bits of wisdom I picked up from my tech mentors was that in tech, things don't "just happen"; you can't say, "well, the program just crashed". The program crashed for a reason. So I've been reflecting for days on Prime Minister Trudeau's reversal of his emergency declaration. It didn't "just happen". It happened for a reason. On Thursday, I listed several possible reasons , and a visitor has helped me sort through their likelihoid. Of potential opposition to the emergency declaration among either...

Amid the generally awful Ukraine coverage yesterday, I discovered a new expression : Russia's foreign ministry said on Friday it was surprised by a remark by UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed that President Vladimir Putin had gone "full tonto". "It is surprising that the British defence minister gives such assessments of the head of another state," Maria Zakharova, the ministry's spokesperson, told a briefing. Sure enough, the Urban Dictionary provides this definition (I assume the Russian foreign ministry had to look this up as well): Gone full tonto taken lunacy to a new level You've gone full tonto there, Simon There's also just Tonto : Tonto When someone completely loses the plot and goes mental at you for no reason. The word can be used in both funny and serious situations. Teachers, partners and mothers are most likely to be described as going ...

Among the revealing data points in yesterday's news was President Brandon's remark to the press , “no one expected sanctions would prevent anything.” The story at the link asks the obvious questions: Huh, what? Then what has the Biden team been talking about, by threatening sanctions over the past month? If they thought that, why have they just been talking about sanctions? Why did Kamala Harris claim that the sanctions would deter Putin? Biden also tripped over White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who said the same thing. . . . Biden’s statement was such a stunning lie and flip-flop on what his team had been saying that even CBS News’ Margaret Brennan called it out. “I thought that was so interesting when President Biden said, ‘No one expected sanctions to prevent anything, Brennan said. “Actually, that’s exactly what his foreign policy team said again and again, and it’s what his secretary of state said to me on Sunday.” My own view is that the remark is compl...

So it's known that Prime Minister Trudeau has revoked his declaration of emergency , only a couple of days afer he and other officials strongly implied it would last at least 30 days. The most detailed explanation of the legal background and implications of the declaration I've seen is in the link above. I've seen little other intelligent commentary, especially for the reasons behind the reversal. The explanations I've seen include: The state of emergency needed to be approved by the Canadian senate. Debate there was underway, and it didn't look good. The declration was withdrawn yesterday before the senate voted, and the senate canceled debate without a vote. Canadian banks and financial institutions may have been pleading behind scenes not to be put in a position of policing their clients. The Mounties were arbitrarily telling Canadian banks to freeze accounts, in at least some cases of people who had donated token amounts to the truckers w...

I've noticed complaints, not just from Prime Minister Trudeau but from other Canadians, that the Freedom Truckers have been partly funded by US donations. The first observation I would make is that, at least until the Canadian emergency declaration, there was nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral per se in making such a donation on either side of the border. There is no indication that any appeals for trucker funds were fraudulent. The second observation I would make is that even before Canada became what is now constituted as Canada, there has been a friendly-adversarial relationship between the neighbors over human rights issues. Before the US Civil War, that territory was the most practical destination of the US Underground Railroad, which was an abolitionist network that facilitated the movement of escaped slaves to areas where they would be safe from recapture. However, even northern non-slave states in the US were required to return escaped slaves to their southern owners...

Justin Trudeau has had a lot of vilification lately, especially from the US side, as a tyrant and a dictator. I think he's a lightweight, but nowhere even near, say, Evita Perón, which is to say that as dictators go, he's AAA baseball.. It's not clear at all for now exactly what the state of emergency he's imposed on Canada entitles him to do, except that it's said the emergency can't override Canadian charter rights, which themselves are pretty vague. For instance, In April 1982, Canada entrenched in its constitution a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 7 of this new document provides that "everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice". The Canadian Bill of Rights (1960), and the British and American constitutions, safeguarded those fundamental rights through the phrase "due process of law" instead of ...

Boondoggle has multiple meanings, but this one from the Urban Dictionary actually seems applicable to the current moment: there's some sort of diplomatic party going on in Munich, to which President Biden has dispatched Vice President Harris, who as far as anyone can tell is incapable of doing anything but relaxing/fun stuff other than work. Yesterday she made the following remarks at the Westin Grand Munich to illustrate that: THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, this was an important trip to be here at the Munich Security Conference — in particular this year, as I said yesterday. We are looking at a moment that is a very decisive moment on one of the bases for the Munich Security Conference and certainly one of the founding reasons for NATO, which is European security and the connection and alliance between Europe and the United States. This was a productive trip, in terms of the extensive bilateral meetings that we had that were in furtherance of the ongoing collaboration a...

Today is February 20, which is one of the dates National Security Handler Jake Sullivan proposed as a perhaps-as-early-as for Russian tanks to appear in the streets of Kyiv. The logic here appears to have been that the Olympics would seize the world's attention, giving Putin the opening to invade while everyone was distracted. The problem was that the Olympics turned out to be the most boring and uneventful in history, and they provided no distraction. They weren't even worth a yawn. The distraction throughout this period has been in Canada. I'll get to that, but let's get to the more imnmediate problem of bad looks. Russian tanks in the streets of European capitals are a bad look. Always have been. Let's face it, they would immediately drown out figure skaters, no matter how good the figure skaters. The guy who's figured this out is Vladimir Putin, who in fact seems to be a world leader who learned something from the 20th century. I get the sense that h...

The puzzling thing to me is how quickly US civil authorities are backing off their COVID mandates even as Trudeau insists mandates even stricter than those in the US are non-negotiable, now to be enforced by horses running down the workers in the streets of the capital. And US and Canadian COVID trends are just about identical: US politicians are scrambling to announce they're "following the science", while Trudeau -- not even in step with his own provincial premiers -- is keeping the controls on by ukase. I don't know where this is going to end up, but it looks like we in the US owe the Canadian truckers a great deal. Events in Windsor and Ottawa have clearly concentrated US minds most wonderfully.

I saw a headline on one of the aggregators this morning : "NYT wonders: Is Putin still rational after two years of pandemic isolation?" It’s one thing to use the madman theory of foreign relations as leverage. It’s quite another to actually have an insane man in charge of a very large, modern military. For years, people have operated on the assumption that Vladimir Putin acted on a coldly rational basis, and based on his pre-pandemic track record, that assumption not only proved safe but accurate. As far as I can see, Putin's strategy in Ukraine has been in place since 2014, when he effectively seized Donbas and Crimea from Ukraine via separatist proxies. As Tucker Carlson put it , But if there’s one thing you absolutely must know about Russia, if you’re going to navigate this world, that thing is that on February 16, 2022, Vladimir Putin is going to invade our closest ally in the world, Ukraine. So write that down — February 16, 2022, Ukraine invasion begins. That’...

This story that I found this morning gives an indication of how strict the COVID regime has been in Canada -- and in spite of that, Quebec's premier, whose regime has been one of the strictest, is against Trudeau's invocation of emergency powers: Quebec stepped up its “deconfinement plan” this week and began lifting coronavirus restrictions, while Premier Francois Legault rejected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s effort to crush the Freedom Convoy protest movement by invoking emergency powers. “I think that I was very clear with the prime minister that the federal Emergencies Act should not, must not apply in Quebec,” Legault said on Monday. “We don’t have any problems in Quebec so far. The Sureté du Québec has everything under control.” . . . CTV News reported that size restrictions on private gatherings have been lifted in Quebec, restaurants can seat more customers, four visitors a day are now permitted at old age homes if they have vaccine passport...

With the predicted morning of the Ukraine invasion come and gone without the spetsnaz parachuting in, there have been remarkably few after-action reports in any media. Of the few, this summary at the never-Trump Hot Air blog seems to give the most favorable analysis for Biden's handlers: “February 15, 2022, will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted. If they really have called off the invasion and they need to huff and puff about western propaganda to save face, have at it. Barring some major secret concession to Putin, it’d be a momentous victory for the White House and NATO to have stopped the biggest war in Europe since World War II without any bombs falling. Has the invasion been called off, though, or merely postponed? Ukraine’s president had been warned by western intelligence that tomorrow, the 16th, was the day Russia planned to attack. He decid...

Here's what I still don't understand about what we're being told in the Ukraine crisis. The claim from National Security Handler Sullivan is that US intelligence says Putin is going to invade tomorrow, maybe, sorta. My first question is that with all the intelligence resources available to him, satellites, drones, signals, bugs, spies on the ground, and everything else, that's the best he can do? Maybe tomorrow? A sub-question to my first question is that the Ukrainians and NATO have equivalent resources, but they don't seem on board with the Sullivan version, especially not the Ukrainians, who are not dullards. The second question is this. The normal policy with intelligence on when and where an enemy will attack is to conceal that you know it. In 1942, the US broke the Japanese naval code and learned they planned an attack on Midway. They secretly moved a carrier force to intercept the Japanese fleet. They last thing they wanted to do was to reveal that they...

Biden's national security handler Jake Sullivan seems to be wandering into Tom Clancy territory, writing thrillers about hypothetical wars: Sullivan told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that Russian forces are positioned so that an invasion could take place before the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which end on February 20. . . . Sullivan on Friday had warned Americans in Ukraine to leave and said that military action could begin with an aerial bombardment that could kill civilians. He reiterated those calls to Tapper on Sunday, saying that a military attack would likely begin with missile and bomb attacks. "Those are never as precise as the army -- any army -- would like them to be. We don't even know how precise the Russian army would like them to be," Sullivan said. "Innocent civilians could be killed regardless of their nationality. It would then be followed by an onslaught of a ground force moving across the Uk...

Yesterday was Saturday of a holiday weekend in the US, and with little else going on, I spent a good part of the day following events in Canada. What struck me was images like the photo above, which isn't from either Windsor or Ottawa, but in this case, Cornwall, ON, more than an hour from Ottawa and much farther from Windsor. But I kept running into other demonstrations and disruptions in places like Fort Erie, ON or the Michigan side of the Blue Water Bridge north of Detroit. Meanwhile, although the Windsor police have cleared the trucks blocking the Ambassador Bridge, it is very unclear whether the bridge is actually open to traffic, since demonstrators continue to mill around in the area, and the police seem reluctant to escalate the situation. This is a key factor, which I'll get to. The same circumstance seems to apply in Ottawa, where as far as I could determine yesterday, a party atmosphere continued to prevail, and crowds of the curious, part-time supporters, and...