In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There's been a certain amount of commentary -- at minimum, somewhat bewildered -- about Pope Francis's recent remarks on Ukraine. The full text of a wider-ranging exchange in which he made them is here . I think they should also be taken in the context of official remarks by Cardinal Parolin , the Vatican Secretary of State: Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, has reiterated that Ukraine has a “legitimate” right to defend itself from Russian aggression, but he also has warned that weapons being sent there by other countries could lead to a “terrible” escalation of the war. “Ukraine is resisting Russia based on this principle,” Parolin said in a recent exclusive interview with CNA, referring to the right of self defense. They should also be seen in the context of CCC 2309 : - the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; - all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown...

I ask this because a new figure (at least, new to me) has been making the talking head rounds, Andrew Kerr, an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner. Kerr is currently best known for revealing a Dec. 3, 2018 recording, previously undiscovered on the laptop Hunter abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, in which Hunter rambles at length on the theme, "Yeah, my father will take any policy positions that I want him to adopt." In at least one interview, though, Kerr suggests this isn't the only one of Hunter's laptops that's gone astray. I haven't been able to find any hard-copy piece by Kerr on the subject, but I did finally run into another piece from last summer here : In an explicit video obtained by the Daily Mail, Hunter Biden told a sex worker back in 2019 that allegedly, Russian drug dealers had stolen his laptop that may have contained "sensitive information" after they partied with him in Las Vegas back in 2018. The video ...

I'm back to my theories on what's actually going on in President Brandon's brain. As I've been saying for some time, I don't think it's senility or dementia; his thinking strikes me as purpose-driven, however obscure that purpose may be. Among the recent headlines saying he's surpassed modern records for presidential vacation days, I see most recently that the Brandons are returning to the beach this weekend: For the second time this month, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will be spending the weekend at their North Shores beach home. The couple was in town the first weekend of June to celebrate Jill’s birthday, which was June 3, and this weekend is Father’s Day. According to the White House’s Daily Guidance and Press Schedule issued June 16, the presidential couple are leaving Washington, D.C., at 11 a.m., Friday, June 17, and are expected to arrive in the Rehoboth area by 11:55 a.m. The guidance doesn’t say when the Bidens will be ...

What intrigues me about the Russia-Ukraine War is how it's first sent me to look at early modern history in Poland, the Baltic region, and Ukraine. But the map above is from Wikipedia and shows the Swedish Empire at its greatest extent about 1720, when the rise of Russia changed alignments. Here's the Wikipedia summary : The Swedish Empire was a European great power that exercised territorial control over much of the Baltic region during the 17th and early 18th centuries (Swedish: Stormaktstiden, "the Era of Great Power"). The beginning of the empire is usually taken as the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, who ascended the throne in 1611, and its end as the loss of territories in 1721 following the Great Northern War. . . . After the victories in the Thirty Years' War, Sweden reached the climax of the great-power era during the Second Northern War, when its primary adversary, Denmark–Norway, was neutralized by the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 (this is when the Swedis...

The photo above was taken by Howard Lewsey, who is a UK-based railroad enthusiast, in Chitila, Romania. Posted on Facebook, it depicts a train of Ukrainian grain cars on their way to a Romanian port for export in order to bypass the Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports. It reflects several important factors in the Russo-Ukraine War that I've mentioned here in passing. Even President Biden mentioned one of these factors in his speech to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia this week : Folks, look, what Putin’s war has done is not only tried to wipe out the culture of the Ukrainians, decimate people, and commit innumerable war crimes, but is also — he’s also prevented the grain — thousands of tons of grain that are locked up in those silos, ready to be exported, but they can’t get out through the Black Sea because they’ll get blown out of the water. So we’re working on a plan to get it out through other countries by rail. But guess what? Ukraine has a system like Russia h...

There's been a steady rise in opinion favoring some sort of negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war, and although the US Right has been consistently against US support for the war, the appeasement option is no longer limited to the Right. For instance, on the 19fortyfive site, Since it became evident a few weeks into Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine that Moscow’s troops were stopped cold outside of Kyiv, there has been a near-universal belief in the West that Ukraine would eventually win. All that was needed, many pundits claimed, was to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces sufficient numbers of weapons and ammunition. As the war now grinds towards the four-month mark, it is becoming painfully evident that the odds are stacked in Russia’s favor. . . . Zelensky and the Ukrainian people will soon come face-to-face with the ugly prospect that continuing to fight will only bring more death and destruction to its people, cities, and armed forces – but ...

There's been a steady stream of stories about Hunter's current situation that don't seem to have been sensational enough to reach the top of the news, but they continue to paint a puzzling picture. Still, according to today's Washington Examiner: Hunter Biden recorded himself boasting that his father will adopt political positions at his command, footage obtained from a copy of his abandoned laptop shows. "He'll talk about anything that I want him to, that he believes in," Biden said in reference to his father, Joe Biden, in the Dec. 3, 2018, recording. "If I say it's important to me, then he will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform. My dad respects me more than he respects anyone in the world, and I know that to be certain, so it’s not going to be about whether it affects his politics.” Shrink? Therapy? Rehab? Hunter laughs! "All those fears you think that I have of people not liking me or that I don’t love myself … ...