In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The text of Ukraine President Zelensky's Tuesday address to the UN Security Council is available here . As rhetoric, it's up there with the speeches that, without a text avaialble, the ancient historians would compose as the speech a statesman would presumably have given taking into account the circumstances he faced and the goals he meant to achieve. But I'm no longer sure if Zelensky has modern parallels -- Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt in their wartime addresses spoke primarily to national audiences or specific groups of allies. Kennedy and Reagan apostrophized Soviet leaders, again with domestic and allied secondary audiences. In his address to the UN, as well as in individual addresses to other world legislatures, Zelensky is rallying much of the civilized world, looking not just to invigorate a base but to bring over the uncommitted. He begins by referencing the particular atrocities the Russian army committed in Bucha, but he moves beyond that to the centra...

I'm not a military analyst, but I watch the coverage of the Russo-Ukraine War. and I'm starting to see a pattern to it that I've seen since the start: the 40-Mile Convoy Syndrome. What I think is the current (and correct) military view is this one from the AP and Pentagon spokesman John Kirby: A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight. “They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. “The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead ve...

Here's a data point for the Russo-Ukraine War: as of Sunday, the Institute for the Study of War's report on the Russian offensive contained the same boilerplate it's had for several weeks : Russian forces continued to capture territory in central Mariupol and will likely capture the city in the coming days. As of yesterday, the ISW began to back off : Little information about what is occurring in Mariupol is available likely due to the loss/interdiction of communications from the city. Russian media reported fighting in the city on April 2. But as of today, they're in full retreat: Additionally, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol have outperformed ISW’s previous estimates and continue to hold the city. Shouldn't people be asking questions about the "experts" who are guiding our military policy? A couple of weeks ago, the buzzword was "culminate". The Russian advance on Kyiv had "culminated", but none of the talking h...

On Thursday, I asked: But someone also should be asking questions about 2018, and indeed, what services the Secret Service is now providing for Hunter, who has adopted a new, very low public profile, at Joe's behest. This man is an addict. Does Hunter now have permanent 24/7 minders? What do the minders do for him to keep him happy but out of trouble? Apparently I'm not the only one to wonder about this. This morning, reports were making the rounds about just these questions : Hunter Biden is renting a home in Malibu, California, for $20,000 per month — and the Secret Service is paying $30,000 per month to rent an adjacent home to provide him with 24/7 protection, according to a report Monday by ABC News. The president’s son is living in the exclusive location and pursuing his art career, even as critics call for a special counsel to take over the investigation into his alleged influence-peddling, which is documented on his infamous laptop, now verified. . . . The ...

I was finishing up yesterday's post with a remark about unanticipated consequences of the Russo-Ukraine War, and the image above came to mind. It's a photo of the French army occupying the Ruhr district in Germany in 1923 as a result of German defaults on reparation payments after World War I. Ukraine President Zelensky has called on Russians to learn the words ‘reparations’ and ‘contributions’. He stressed that Russia would reimburse Ukraine for everything that was destroyed during the war. Something like this must inevitably occur if the world is to avoid a circumstance where Russia simply withdraws from Ukraine, rebuilds for some period of years, and tries the same thing again. The same applies to war crimes. The evidence of large-scale executions of civilians in the liberated Kyiv suburbs Bucha and Irpin is an indication that such massacres are probably even more widespread and will need full investigstion and prosecution. The problem is enforcement. Ukraine alre...

The suddenness of the Russian collapse and retreat around Kyiv is just another illustration of how consistently Ukraine has outperformed the conventional wisdom throughout the war. Just a few days ago, reports that the Russians were digging trenches in the Chernobyl radioactive area were taken as a sign that they were going to stay there and use it as a base to reconstitute their forces, at minimum to keep Ukraine's army tied down around Kyiv while they shifted their efforts to Donbas. All of a sudden, the reports instead were that as of Thursday. Russian troops had left the Chernobyl facility entirely , with other reports that the soldiers who had been digging trenches were being treated for radiation sickness. Although most discussions of the developments around Kyiv characterize them conservatively as an organized strategic withdrawal by the Russians to refocus their forces, the report from the BBC below stresses that the withdrawal was forced by Ukrainian attacks and, given ...

When I wrote the old blog on subjects like "continuing" Anglicanism, I ran into contextual distractions, including a supposed Orthodox option for people dissatisfied with Episcopalianism, or indeed novus ordo Catholicism. The poster child for this option is Rod Dreher : Raised a Methodist, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993, and subsequently wrote widely in the Catholic press. Covering the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, starting in 2001, led him to question his Catholicism, and on October 12, 2006, he announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. At the time, Dreher had argued that the scandal was not so much a "pedophile problem", but that the "sexual abuse of minors is facilitated by a secret, powerful network of gay priests", known as the "Lavender Mafia" Various correspondents over the years have urged this option on me, but as far as I can tell, the option isn't popular, there are certainly accounts from people wh...