In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday, the Never Trump, Not Quite Zelensky Hot Air blog quoted Don Jr: According to senior officials, [Biden's Lend-Lease] proposal, which includes $20.4bn in military aid, $8.5bn in economic aid and $3bn in humanitarian aid, is needed to "enable Ukraine's success over the next five months of this war". Responding to the report, former president Donald Trump's eldest son suggested that the fund sent by the US would be "looted by corrupt politicians". "Hard pass. How about we use it to help Americans in need? Or to perhaps secure our border? Maybe get our energy sector going again? Education? No, instead we’ll give it to one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where I’m sure most will be looted by corrupt politicians," he wrote on Twitter. A little over a week ago, Tucker Carlson said, "Inflation is higher than it's been in generations, maybe than it has been ever, depending on how you measure it," Carlson sai...

There can be few better arguments for the idea that Twitter is, or had been, a de facto agency for government censorship than the Biden administration's proposal for a new Disinformation Governance Board only days after Twitter's directors accepted Elon Musk's buyout offer. But the ramifications go beyond the predictable political alignments. Witness the reaction of the Never Trump Hot Air blog: Very encouraging that the new owner thinks it was bad form to silence a guy who had just incited a riot by conspiracy theorists at the Capitol and seemed capable of inciting a lot more amidst his mania to overturn the 2020 election. Trump can rest easy now knowing that his mic won’t be cut the next time he tries a coup, I guess. This report from the WSJ makes me consider a question to which only Elon Musk himself knows the answer. Namely, to what extent is buying a Twitter a business decision for him? Does he feel pure altruism in wanting to improve an influential communicatio...

Accordding to Wikipedia, The rope-a-dope is a boxing fighting technique in which one contender draws non-injuring offensive punches (sometimes while leaning against the rope of the boxing ring) to let the opponent tire themselves out. This gives the former the opportunity to then execute devastating offensive maneuvers to help them win. The rope-a-dope is most famously associated with Muhammad Ali in his October 1974 Rumble in the Jungle match against world heavyweight champion George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. It seems to me that the Ukrainian strategy, as well as defeat in detail, which I've discussed here , is also rope-a-dope. So far, I haven't seen any analysis of the war that covers this, which is an argument for staying away from sites like ISW and spending time on the reddit /r ukraine conflict site. Here is a thread there based on a Twitter thread that quotes a Russian's detailed account of his deployment in Donbas: . . . At the start of March the brig...

I spent the first part of my working career making red (or blue) marks like those above, and I thereby learned what Samuel Johnson meant when he said teaching is "intricate misery". If I discovered anything else in the process, it was that bad writing has a close relation to bad thinking, but I'm not sure if I can go much beyond that. This seems to apply to what passes for prestigious analysis of the current war in Ukraine, especially from the Institute for the Study of War. Let's take a passage from their April 26 update : Russian forces have adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine, at least along the line from Izyum to Rubizhne. Russian troops are pushing down multiple roughly parallel roads within supporting distance of one another, allowing them to bring more combat power to bear than their previous practice had supported. This could actually be a good introductory sentence for several subsequent paragraphs giving specific insta...

So fat, I haven't seen any commentary that ties the events of the past two weeks together. April 14: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter April 18: U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle strikes down the federal mask mandate for airplanes and other modes of public transportation April 21: CNN announces cacellation of CNN+ April 22: Florida Gov Ron DeSantis signs bill revoking special Disney status in the state April 25: Twitter board unanimously accepts Musk buyout offer. In the space of a week and a half, the country took important steps to bring itself out of the 2020 moral panic. This included a major defeat for woke control of key news and entertainment and a near-final end to most COVID restrictions. There's been a lot of reaction to each individual event, especially the Musk takeover of Twitter, but nobody's seeing this as a much bigger milestone. If I were to go farther with the big picture, I'd say this is taking place in the context of the Ukraine war...

The meme above is from Roy, a guy I first met 40 years ago. To say he is something of a character is an understatement. His main post-retirement activity is to dress to the nines and take selfies at LA cultural sites, of which there are many, and post them on Facebook, so he's busy. Recently he's been taking maskless selfies on Metrolink trains to make the point that even before last week's order from Judge Mizelle, Metrolink staff had stopped enforcing the mask mandates, we must assume with the tacit endorsement of both their union and management. Last week I posted on what I speculated was Metrolink's dilemma when "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the LA County health director, issued an order saying that despite the TSA's ceasing mask enforcement, with Amtrak and the airlines following suit, public transit in LA County must continue to enforce masking. Among the problems I saw in this was that Metrolink operates in four other counties besides LA, and a train t...

I'm still puzzled at the horrible quality of Ukraine war analysis. Here's a snippet of yesterday's assessment from the Institute for the Study of War : CORRECTION: ISW mistakenly reported on April 23 that Russian troops seized Lozova, Kharkiv Oblast, approximately 100km west of Izyum. Russian troops actually seized Lozove, Donetsk Oblast, approximately 35km east of Izyum. We apologize for the error. Every few days there's something like this. The authors listed at the top of yesterday's assessment are Mason Clark and Kateryna Stepanenko . Stepanenko is a Ukrainian name, and I assume that Ms Stepanenko is a native speaker and (at least presumably) famiiar with the country's geography. As far as I can see, this would be roughly equivalent to a California writer confusing Monterey, CA with Monterey Park, CA, locations 325 miles apart, an extremely sloppy error. I don't know what staff members at ISW make, but I've got to think whatever it is, it'...