In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

When I started this blog, I began to tease out a theory of the post-2020 agenda as a Götterdämmerung strategy a lot like people who expected the world to end on December 21, 2012, but took this as a sign that they could run up their credit cards until that date and never have to repay them. What we saw over the course of 2021 was instead the gradual repudiation of the 2020 agenda, the legislative failure of Build Back Better, the marginalization of BLM, the Squad, and Defund the Police, and even more recently the functionial disappearance of many 2020-era COVID restrictions. With Putin's invasion of Ukraine resetting Western security priorities, you'd think the 2020 agenda would continue to fade. Instead, for now, I'm beginning to think the elites are cooking up a way to reconstitute key parts of the 2020 agenda as Götterdämmerung Lite. The main problem with this approach is that events are coming so quickly that they're getting inside the lizard people's OODA...

A puzzling factor in the generally flaccid US national debate on Ukraine is what advocates self-characterize as the Red Pill view. In general, it says that Zelensky is a tool of the globalists; we should not be risking World War III to defend Ukraine; Putin is after all reasonable in wanting Ukraine to stay out of NATO and the EU. There are numerous variations on this view. One of the more justifiable is from Don Surber : NATO was formed to stop the Soviet Union from taking over Europe. The Scandinavians stood on the sideline. Now they want in? No thanks. We already have too many countries to defend because NATO doubled its size since the USSR dissolved on December 25, 1991, collapsing under the weight of its own economic and social failure. The United States should firmly tell Finland and Sweden to take a hike. In the face of evil, they stood on the sidelines while the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Poles and others trapped in the clutches of the USSR fought bravely from with...

US coverage of the Ukraine war continues to be inexcusably bad, and this is across the board, from big corporate media including Fox all the way over to smaller independent outlets like Salem Media and Breitbart. Look at this below-the-fold piece at Salem Media's Red State : Analysts I’ve discussed Russian military activity patterns with note that, until this weekend, their use of force has been remarkably constrained and surgical. They’ve made little attempt to engage the Ukrainian military in a full-force, armored mobile front battle, even though they clearly have the mass and firepower to do so. As of today, they are playing cat and mouse games with the mayors of the cities they’ve surrounded, engaging in combinations of harassing bombardments and offers of refugee corridors. It’s not hard to see that they have orders to absorb some casualties, while bearing in mind that, when the war ends, their country will have to rebuild everything they blow up. Forget about the so-call...

By yesterday, I grew increasinghly frustrated with what I was hearing, especially from US corporate media (including Fox), on what is actually going on in Ukraine. The retired US general talking heads seem to have settled on a consensus that, for instance,the 40-mile column stalled north of Kyiv will get moving any time now and begin reducing the city with artillery. That's how Russia operates. But this hasn't happened, while I get the impression that Ukraine is learning how the Russians operate, is following a coherent strategy, and is having increasing success in the field. I worked hard for most of the day to find better sources. One of them is in the link above; it concentrates on the level of corporate corruption, nonfeasance, and incompetence in the Russian armed forces that explains some part of their current predicament. Another source I found just this morning, a post on the Chicago Boyz blog , concentrates on actual Ukrainian military strategy that's another cl...

As of yesterday, Los Angeles County, one of the major holdouts on loosening COVID restrictions throughout the pandemic, dropped its indoor masking rule . County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that given the CDC revision of the county's classification, a new Health Officer Order will be issued that removes the county's long-standing mandate for people to wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status. That move will put the county in alignment with the state, which dropped its mask mandate on Tuesday. Mask-wearing, however, will continue to be "strongly recommended,'' particularly in crowded settings or while interacting with people at higher risk of severe illness from the virus. Masking will continue to be required in higher-risk settings, including health care facilities, transit centers, airports, aboard public transit, in correctional facilities and at homeless shelters and long-term care facilities. It's still likely to take yea...

I'm seeing a certain amount of defeatism over Ukraine's predicament, from sources ranging from the never-Trump Red State site to the UK YouTuber demirep/granniopteryx . Part of this, I think, is the difficulty some people are having getting their heads around the bigger picture. For instrance, as the meme above suggests, I think the short-lived Canadian state of "emergency" and Putin's invasion of Ukraine are two symptoms of a bigger trend, the closing window of opportunity that had existed during the COVID moral panic. Let's recall that the short-lived "emergency" Trudeau declared was layered upon state after state of "emergency" already declared by federal governments, provinces, states, counties, cities, towns, and local health departments in North America and everywhere else throughout the COVID panic, which as we speak are still being overtaken (or not) by events. For instance, the US Senate voted just yesterday 48-47 to cance...

A writer for Red State, a never-Trump Salem Media outlet has nevertheless recognized the real merit of Zelensky's March 2 address to Ukraine , calling it "the greatest speech of our era", which is not empty hyperbole. He went to the effort of transcribing much of it from the subtitles on the screen: During this war, we have had more unity than for over thirty years before. At first, we were equally scared, then we felt equally painful, and now we do not care. Except for victory. Except for the truth. Except for peace. Except for the tranquility we want to achieve. Except for the lives of our people, for when we are worried. Except for Ukraine. During this time, we have truly become one. We forgave each other a lot. We started loving each other. We help each other. We are worried for each other. Yesterday morning on Freedom Square we were all Kharkiv residents. Then the enemy destroyed us all by striking at residential buildings in Borodyanka. We were all bombed in K...