In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

It's a holiday weekend in the US on top of the Super Bowl, so naturally Biden's handlers are sending cryptic messages about how Putin may or may not be ready to invade Ukraine. The one person who doesn't seem to be bothered is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “The Ukrainians presented a very hard position,” said Russian envoy Dmitry Kozak, noting that it was impossible to reconcile conflicting interpretations of an accord, known as the Minsk agreements, designed to halt the fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists. . . . On Thursday, Kozak chided the Europeans for failing to bring Ukraine into compliance. “My impression was that the Western diplomacy had no impact on the Ukrainian position in the talks,” Kozak said. The mood in Washington seems strangely disconnected: “There is a credible prospect that a Russia military action would take place even before the Olympics,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at the...

Ever since Rush Limbaugh's passing, I've been wondering who'll replace him. The most obvious candidate has been Tucker Carlson, but his problem (which Limbaugh himself recognized) is that as a Trinity College alum (to be clear, the "little Ivy" liberal arts school in Hartford, CT), he's too Episcopalian and too prep, and indeed, as the son of a deep state actor and media bigwig , too connected to the existing system. The current Canadian Freedom Convoy story is beginning to illustrate what Limbaugh alone at his best was able to bring to the party: an out-of-control sense of humor. There's something uniquely Canadian about the response to the Freedom Convoy that resonates with the US picture of Canada, however distorted this may be, but the overwhelming fact is that, as the "occupations" of Ottawa, Windsor, and Coutts continue with Trudeau and other civil authorities making impotent threats, the situation has become hilariously entertaining...

What I hear from Canada via e-mail about the Freedom Convoy suggests to me that the whole story isn't as cut and dried as its supporters, especially in the US, might believe, and I'm not in a position to comment on it directly. On the other hand, the two countries are close whether either likes it or not, and events like the Freedom Convoy inevitably affect both sides of the border -- how much did a 2020 trucker protest in Washington, illustrated above, inspire the Canadian truckers in 2022? By thr same token, US Homeland Security is now warning of a potential US Freedom Convoy starting at the Super Bowl and proceeding to Washington next week: According to senior law enforcement officials and documents obtained by Yahoo News, the warning circulated to law enforcement nationwide on Tuesday by DHS states that the agency “has received reports of a convoy of truckers planning to potentially block roads in major metropolitan cities in the United States in protest of, among o...

I haven't commented on the Canadian trucker protests here, because so far, I don't think I've had anything to add beyond what Canadian independent media and other observers worldwide have already said. If they get any of it wrong, that's on them. But as of the middle of last night, one thing has struck me, the dog that isn't barking. As far as I can see, the Ottawa civil authorities, backed up by the prime minister himself, have issued the following bill of particulars against the truckers: They are boorish They are violating traffic laws They are violating noise ordinances They are maintaining dangerous stocks of gasoline and propane They are conducting psychological warfare They are infiltrated and financed by anti-Canadian Trumpists from across the border They are destroying Canadian democracy They are un-Canadian They are racists, Confederate secessionists, and Nazis....

My thinking abouit trhe Penn women's swim team has inevitably brought me back to the selection scene at the beginning of the whole Men in Black franchise. For those who aren't familiar with it, the premise of the series is that the space aliens have already arrived, but the government has worked out a super-secret agreement with the aliens to let them stay on the planet if they're careful to stay out of sight. The job of the Men in Black, an ultra-secret, ultra-elite cadre, is on one hand to enforce the agreement with the space aliens, while on the other to act as a cleanup crew in cases where the aliens have inadvertently revealed themselves to ordinary people. It goes without saying that anyone tasked with making sure the space aliens stay quiet and out of sight, as well as cleaning up situations where they don't, must have extraordinary tact, intellect, skill, and initiative. At the start of the first Men in Black film, Agent J, played by Will Smith, has unknowin...

Unfortunately, while the acounts I've linked of the Penn women swimmers' dilemma outline their near-impossible choices very clearly, my sympathy extends only so far. The conventional wisdom is that the swimmers are being denied the chance to compete fairly in women's competitions by allowing a male swimmer to skew the results, and on top of that, they're being subjected to sexual harassment when the male exposes his genitals in the women's locker room. But if they complain -- indeed, if they go even so far as to report the indecent exposure to law enforcement or follow policy and complain to the campus sexual harassment coordinator -- they face loss of scholarship, dismissal from the team, and loss of future career prospects. But this is simply a microcosm of the larger Ivy dilemma, which has been around since the late 1940s when the Ivies became selective and at least in theory "meritocratic". At least, David Brooks thinks that way. The more or less d...