In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've become more interested in Antony Blinken over the past several months, since he appears to be an independent policy actor within the Biden administration. In early March, less than two weeks after Putin invaded Ukraine, the White House and the Pentagon publicly contradicted Blinken over a plan to send secondhand Polish Migs to Ukraine : But the proposal isn’t as simple as it seems and apparently caught US diplomats off guard when Poland announced the plan Tuesday. Previously, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had indicated that Poland sending jets to Ukraine would get “the green light” from the Biden administration, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, also supported the plan in an appearance on ABC’s This Week last Sunday. However, the report said, "Biden administration concerns about escalating US involvement in the conflict appear to have stalled the deal." According to Politico , [S]keptics inside the Biden administratio...

There was a big news pseudo-event yesterday when President Brandon, in yet another gaffe, asked during a speech at a White House conference, “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” He was referring to the late Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who passed away this past August in an auto accident. The explanation appears to be that apparently, his notes (or the teleprompter) told him to make sure to honor the late representative, but weren't specific enough. Thus In fact, Biden’s teleprompter was cueing him to speak about Walorski specifically because she is deceased. The man in possession of our nuclear football did not know the woman he was calling out for is dead, did not know he was supposed to be honoring her memory – because she is dead – and likely did not know what was supposed to happen after that moment. Apparently, a memorial video was supposed to play, but the White House aides shut down the President and never played the video in a desperate attempt to erase h...

Recently I ran across two essays that outline what I take to be the right-wing case against aiding Ukraine. I have some suspicion that neither is completely ingenuous, but I'll take their points at face value. The first is by Michael Walsh, 'Not Worth the Bones of a Single Grenadier' at a site called The Pipeline, which seems to carry National Review types like John O'Sullivan. He begins with an argument we'll see again: Bismarck was right about the Balkans, but he might as well have been speaking of the Ukraine, a troubled land (its name means "borderland"), oft-conquered, rarely independent, generally restive, and almost always miserable. Like the Kurds, the Ukrainians are for reasons of geography basically a people without a country. . . But the same might be said about half of Europe; Poland wasn't a country at all throughout the 19th century; Belgium didn't emerge until 1830 and has been twice invaded since then by Germany, which i...

I've noted here now and then that there's a schism within the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox denomination, arising from the dissolution of the Soviet Union but recently exacerbated by the Russo-Ukraine War. The Wikipedia entry on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) says, Prior to May 2022, the Primate of the UOC-MP was the most senior permanent member of the ROC's Holy Synod and thus had a say in its decision-making in respect of the rest of the ROC throughout the world. On May 27, 2022, the UOC declared its independence from the Moscow Patriarchate due to Patriarch Kirill's support of the invasion of Ukraine. Before its decision for full independence, more than 400 parishes had left the Moscow Patriarchate as a consequence of the invasion. Most recently Patriarch Kirill has tied the Orthodox faith directly to fighting in Ukraine : While celebrating the Divine Liturgy on Wednesday at the Zachatyevsky Monastery, which is traditio...

Via the UK Daily Mail -- there's not much on this in the US. Former President Trump said he hopes is 'wrong' about the possibility of World War III because the U.S. is being run by 'stupid people' at a rally in Wilmington, N.C. on Friday. 'I was right about Ukraine. I was right about what, Taiwan and I'm hoping I'm not going to be right about World War Three, because we have stupid people dealing,' the former president said, as he predicted the U.S. would lose a conflict to Russia. . . . 'Putin mentioned the N word,' Trump told the crowd. 'You know what the N word is? It's-- no, no, no, it's the nuclear word. You mentioned the N word yesterday. The nuclear were not supposed to be mentioned,' Trump continued, as he claimed the Russian invasion 'never would've happened' under his presidency. As far as I can tell, Trump's remarks in Wilmington mainly covered US domestic politics and focused on e...

Here's just another data point on the condition of the big guy's mind : President Joe Biden surprised viewers Friday when pausing his speech to acknowledge a woman in the crowd he said he knew when she was 12. “You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said during a speech at the National Education Association headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We go back a long way. She was 12 — I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.” Biden did not acknowledge how he knew the woman or what she did that helped him, but the remark caught viewers off guard. Videos of the remarks show a remarkably animated Biden as he recalls whatever the episode might have been: As opposed to his normal affectless. squint-eyed expression, he's flirty and even devilish as he alludes to some mutual memory that had to have been at least a bit naughty. A few commentators have noted that the audience, teachers' union members, giggled and tittered with the big guy. It...

After a two-month absence from YouTube, Austrian Col Reisner is back after only two weeks with another odd take on the Russo-Ukraine War. Let me preface this by saying yet again that I was thrown out of the ROTC after a year, and that's the full extent of my experience in the US or any other country's army. But here's my take on that war. Russia, thought to be the second-ranked military power on the planet, managed to bungle its invasion of Ukraine from the start. Within days, US generals were commenting that the Russian army was simply failing to meet its initial objectives, and this was with Ukraine's army having no Western resupply and fighting almost entirely with its existing stock of hand-held anti-tank weapons and cheap drones. Within months, still with hesitant Western support, Ukraine was able to force the Russians to retreat from their main line of attack, the effort to seize Kyiv. In the next phase of the war, Ukraine fought Russia to a stalemate with se...

So Scott Adams has inserted himself into the news : “Dilbert” author Scott Adams, who has been drawing the comic since 1989, said the strip that pokes fun at office culture was wiped from nearly 77 newspapers. Lee Enterprises, which owns nearly 100 newspaper companies in the US, terminated the contract with “Dilbert” for unknown reasons, reports Fox News. “It was part of a larger overhaul, I believe, of comics, but why they decided what was in and what was out, that’s not known to anybody except them, I guess,” said Adams, who noted it coincidentally happened after he incorporated “wokeness” into the stories. I've followed him long enough to recognize there's nothing new about this. In 2016, he supported Trump, and at the time, he complained that his speaking engagements fell to almost nothing -- and I think he recognized that Trump didn't sit well with the Silicon Valley types and tech workers who felt Adams was on their side. I watched his YouTube channel at t...

I'm convinced there's a latter-day George F Kennan now at the State Department who, like the one who wrote the Long Telegram, has the ear of some contemproary Averell Harriman, who in turn can tell important people what to do. Consider that the one area in which President Brandon has effectively recused himself in recent months has been Ukraine. Either Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, or Gen Milley articulates US Ukraine policy and says (or carefully omits to say) what weapons we are sending there. Early in the game, it seems the big guy contradicted Secretary Blinken on whether Ukraine would get third-party surplus Migs, but somehow the Migs happened anyhow, while the big guy effectively stopped talking about Ukraine. At all. Biden's tendency to ramble and interfere has been fairly well documented, for instance : The veteran Senator, as Obama saw it, had a tendency to “ramble, clearly loving every minute of it". The would-be President is said to have c...

The N-word in this case is "narcissism". Last week I ran across this more or less typical piece of pop psychology : Based on an analysis of the 19 presidents who served between 1897 and 2009 (from William McKinley to George W. Bush), the degree to which a commander in chief exhibited grandiose narcissistic personality traits is correlated with the duration of any wars they presided over. . . . [Ohio State political scientist John P Harden] used data pulled from the Correlates of War database, which tracks conflicts involving at least 1,000 deaths in battle within a one-year period – so 11 operations for the US during the study period. This was cross-referenced with previous research that analyzed the characters of US presidents, in part through their biographers. High levels of assertiveness and excitement-seeking, and low levels of modesty, compliance and straightforwardness were used to measure narcissistic tendencies. US chiefs who scored lower on narcissism, includ...

As the saying goes, you don't have dementia if you forget your keys. You have dementia if you forget what your keys are for. President Brandon seems to have stepped all over not just his allies but his diplomatic advisers in Sunday's 60 Minutes interview , but I see no signs of dementia. The reaction at the Daily Kos was predictable to his announcement that the pandemic is over: 'You’re counting votes.' We are 'counting bodies': Experts outraged at Biden deeming pandemic over . But nobody seems to dispute that he was aware of his surroundings, knew this was a television interview, and was more or less aware of the questions and giving answers that reflected the overall context. The problem was that he basically hadn't done the prep. The public health establishment is at the very best deeply divided over what to do next with the pandemic; over the summer, it became clear that the public is fed up with vax and masks, and it quietly backed off on threats ...

Yesterday, I noted that prior to the first weeks of the Russo-Ukraine War, there was an effective consensus that Russia was the second-strongest military power and a near peer to the US and NATO. Trump has had a fair amount of criticism for remarks earlier this year that have been interpreted as "praising Putin", but I think if we take them in context of prevailing world opinion, they don't strike me as unusual. This piece at CNN lists some of Trump's remarks on Putin from last spring: At a campaign rally in Georgia [March 26], the former President, again, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart. And I actually thought he was going to be negotiating. I said, ‘That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 soldiers on the border.’” Trump added that Putin made a “big mistake,” but that “it looked...

The Austrian Col Markus Reisner is still highly regarded as a war analyst on reddit, but as I've noted, although he certainly looks the part, his recent commentary has been largely irrelevant, overtaken by events, and even disingenuous. On the other hand, the eponymous Kos at the left-wing Daily Kos has been consistently the most insightful and predictive throughout the war. Let's take an example. Here's last night's analysis from the Institute for the Study of War , which is actually a cut above their usual performance: Russian forces continue to conduct meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut instead of focusing on defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives that continue to advance. Russian troops continue to attack Bakhmut and various villages near Donetsk City of emotional significance to pro-war residents of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) but little other importance. . . . The Russians cannot hope to make gains around Bakhmut o...

Every couple of decades I seem to run into something that conveys the essence of the Ivy League as I experienced it as an undergraduate. My wife normally removes all communications from my alma mater from the incoming mail and quietly throws them out before I can see them, but around 20 years ago, she missed an invitation from a local alumni group to attend a lecture from one of the "superstar" (their word) professors who'd be visiting. I decided to attend. The lecture was so awful that I wound up getting involved in the ill-fated Dartmouth alumni trustee movement to see what I might do to change things. At least I didn't get a heart attack, and that's a different story anyhow, but it's an indicator of why my wife normally keeps that sort of thing away from me. Just lately, Yale has been running a series of YouTube lectures on Ukraine by one of their own superstars, Timothy Snyder . There's a link to one of them at the top of this post. I watched it...