In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

With the US trucker convoy in Washington as President Biden is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address, the US media, at least, has shifted its attention back to Washington, although US media reporting on Ukraine has been bad across the spectrum anyhow, legacy or independent, left or right. A few things have been lost in the confusion, such as the remarkable sequence above in which Biden has no answer to the question of whether he underestimated Putin and variously smirks, stares blankly, and picks his teeth. The establishment media figure George Stephanopoulos asked Press Secretary Psaki over the weekend about Biden's mental capacity : "The president is approaching his State of the Union in a pretty difficult political position right now, 37% approval rating, Democrats trailing badly in the midterm polling," Stephanopoulos said. "A majority in our recent poll out this morning even question the president’s mental capacity. How is he going to turn...

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...