In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A big problem I had throughout the 40-mile convoy phase of the Russo-Ukraine War was the daily YouTube posts of Russian armored columns being defeated in detail by small Ukrainian units with anti-tank missiles. These were just everyday occurrences, and I kept wondering why the conventional wisdom kept asserting that these somehow didn't happen or weren't important. And they weren't important until the Russians simply abandoned their whole northern offensive. The YouTube indicator has been changing lately. Throughout May and June, while the attritional battle in the Donbas was under way, there were far fewer YouTube posts from the front of any sort. But since early July, we've been seeing several things. The first is that there have been almost no retired US general talking heads prognosticating on the course of the war. Isn't that strange? You couldn't keep them away from the camera during the halcyon days of the 40-mile convoy. Now, zilch. The second thin...

Right now, as far as I can tell, there are two people running for king of the world, Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. As I noted yesterday, Musk recently visited Pope Francis to talk about his ideas on improving the world and humanity. Jordan Peterson has occasionally done the same with Bp Barron, but yesterday he scolded NATO, the EU, and the whole Western alliance for wanting to start World War III if they don't appease Putin in Ukraine. Today he turns to the Christian churches. His heavy-lidded pose at the start of his video above verges on self-satire. Indeed, I wonder if he isn't just running for king of the world; he must be running instead for philosopher-king of the world. What intrigues me about Peterson and Christians -- whether he is a Chrstian of any identifiable type has been, and continues to be, open to debate -- is that his arguments for Christianity, or for that matter any religion, track mainly with Jonathan Swift's An Argument Against Abolishing Chr...

Trump's recent remarks about Elon Musk reminded me how refreshing his perceptions of other public figures used to be: Nancy Pelosi is “highly overrated and highly incompetent”. Jeb Bush is "an embarrassment to his family. . . . Frankly, he’s a stiff." Hillary Clinton "may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.” Drs Fauci and Birx were "two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” I hope that, regardless of the outcome, we get this sort of thing back, even for a little while. In the case of Elon Musk, I'd been having doubts already that even if he was the richest man in the world, he maybe wasn't the smartest, but Trump's assessment pushed these questions to the front of my mind. In the meme above, which it appears Musk put together himself and posted on Twitter, he seems to be laughing just a ...

If you go to YouTube and do a search on words like "HIMARS ammo explosion", you'll get well over a dozen hits, most representing recent attacks from Ukraine's new NATO high-precision rockets and artillery into Russian rear areas. The resulting detonations of ammunition depots can continue for hours, and in recent weeks, multiple strikes of this sort occur daily. It's difficult to think this isn't having an impact on the Russian campaign: if the assertion is that they've been firing tens of thousands of artillery rounds per day, how can they sustain this rate if some tens of thousands a day are going up in storage instead? This question has other ramifications, but I'm less interested in how the war is progressing than I am in how this question is being handled by some of our most prestigious analysts, viz , those employed by the Institute for the Study of War. Yesterday I posted on cogent commentary from the UK that suggests that whole cadres of pre...

The video above is a post on a UK YouTube channel called Podcast of the Lotus Eaters entitled "Corporate America is Adult Day Care". They're responding to a particular woman's TikTok portrayal of her typical work day at Linkedin, which is a Silicon Valley-based social media company comparable to Twitter, Facebook, or Google. On one hand, I would caution that working conditions and benefits vary widely among US corporate, small business, and government employers, and I would say that even among tech companies, not all engage in such extravagant pampering of employees. On the other hand, the woman in the TikTok video makes it unintentionally plain that Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and comparable employers do compete for the type of pampered, entitled pseudo-workers that she represents. I frequently commuted to Silicon Valley in my working career, and there's no question that the sorts of benefits, as well as other perks and tchotchkes, that she celebrates...

This seems to be one of those days where the conventional wisdom floods the web. But this had been one of those mornings where I sat up in bed suddenly thinking I remembered there'd been a Russian "operational pause" back in March, just before they completely withdrew from Irpin and Bucha and gave up the attempt to encircle Kyiv. So as soon as I finished my coffee, I started doing web searches, but no matter how I phrased my search, all I got was the latest "Russia Taking 'Operational Pause' in Ukraine, Analysts Say" from all the usual suspects, to the tune of over a million hits. Whence do these pearls of conventional wisdom emanate? One guess. Foreign analysts say Russia may be temporarily easing its offensive in Ukraine as the Russian military attempts to reassemble its forces for a renewed assault. On Wednesday, Russian forces made no claimed or assessed territorial gains in Ukraine “for the first time in 133 days of war,” according to the In...

As I've noted here, since last summer, Hunter Biden seems to have been kept on a very short leash in a heavily-guarded compound in the Malibu Hills that adjoins a luxury rehab facility. Over the past week, though, it's slowly emerged that he's apparently been paroled under parental supervision. According to the New York Post , The younger Biden, who has long been accused of profiting off his father’s influence and connections, has been a fixture in Washington this week after spending much of the Fourth of July weekend at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. After accompanying the president back to the nation’s capital on Marine One Monday, Hunter was pictured watching the Independence Day fireworks from the White House’s Truman Balcony with his 2-year-old son, Beau — named after his late older brother — and his father. He's pictured above with his wife, Melissa Cohen, although I question whether she (or particularly their toddler son) lives with him a...