In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...