In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Last night, my wife and I watched a true crime show on the Lacey Spears case , in which Spears, a single mother desperate for attention, wildly overshared on social media about her son Garnett's health struggles. Garnett passed away at the age of 5 from high levels of sodium leading to swelling in his brain. On March 2, 2015, a jury found Spears guilty of murdering her son by poisoning him with table salt, which she had administered to him from infancy through his feeding tube. The case has become a well-known example of Munchausen by proxy : Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick. Most discussions attribute its motivation to attention-seeking by the mother, but in another case, the Dee Dee Blancard murder , the mother exploited her daughter's putative handicaps and disabilities to live entire...

Somehow I've always had a soft spot for Austria, in some measure due to its consistent history since the death of Prince Metternich of getting things about as wrong as they could be gotten, but in a charming, lost-cause sort of way. An example of what I like about Austria is Federal Army Col Markus Reisner's YouTube commentaries on the Russo-Ukraine War, which originally struck me as impressive, but of which I've been skeptical since his more recent ones. He's actually been silent since early July; for comparison, that presentation is below. This was a generally pessimistic assessment for the Ukrainian side -- the only favorable factor he saw for Ukraine was that it had kept control of Kyiv, while he foresaw increasing Russian efforts to close one or more cauldrons in Donbas, relying especially on closing a pincer from Popasna north and Izyum south. He saw attrition as a key factor, and he especially saw attrition as a factor that would minimize the effects of th...

A video in my YouTube feed caught my eye, from a UK channel that's usually pretty highbrow in its tone. As you can see, its title is "Church sings for the first time God save the King ". This actually didn't strike me as an earth-shattering event, since it mainly involved some gender pronouns, but I decided to watch it, just because we ex-Anglicans like that sort of church music. What struck me was that the actual singing wasn't going to take place until well into the service, and it was preceded by extended reflections from the celebrant meant to prepare those attending for this change. The celebrant was wearing a purple chasuble. I looked this up, and in the US Roman Catholic Church, white, purple, or black vestments may be worn at masses for the dead, so this is OK -- but it was hard for me to shake the idea that the Queen's death had a special quasi-sacramental character, especially as related to the pronouns in the national anthem. The Queen is the su...

This has been reported on social media as a message from Zelensky to the Russian people. Over the course of the war, he seems to be giving fewer formal addresses, and instead, somewhat like Trump, he's relying on shorter Twitter-style posts. The original source of this one appears to be hard to trace, but a reddit comment carries what is claimed to be the most reliable text : Even through the impenetrable darkness, Ukraine and the civilized world clearly see these terrorist acts. Deliberate and cynical missile strikes on civilian critical infrastructure. No military facilities. Kharkiv and Donetsk regions were cut off. In Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Sumy there are partial problems with power supply. Do you still think that we are "one people"? Do you still think that you can scare us, break us, make us make concessions? You really did not understand anything? Don't understand who we are? What are we for? What are we talking about? Read my lips: Without gas ...

I think the great unspoken insight over the past few days has been, for all the low expectations the world had for the Prince of Wales, King Charles III actually looks like a head of an important state. Beyond that, he's at least been acting like the head of a family : The King ordered his warring sons to set aside their ongoing feud ahead of the Queen's funeral, leading the pair to reunite in public for the first time in more than a year, it was last night revealed. Royal sources say Prince William attempted to bury the hatchet by extending an '11th-hour olive branch' to his younger brother Prince Harry, by asking him to join him on a walkabout outside Windsor Castle following a phone call with his father Charles. In a scene that clearly delighted royal fans, who had come in their hundreds to the gates of the Windsor estate to mourn the Queen's death, William and Harry walked out side-by-side with wives Kate and Meghan. "The King ordered. . ." Think ...

At this point, Ukrainian successes from what analysts currently think is a surprise counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region have simply been outpacing the ability of media to cover them. Here's Newsweek as of midday yesterday, Putin's Troops Have Two Days to Attack or Face Defeat: Ex-Military Leader : Igor Girkin, who also goes by Igor Strelkov, gave an update on the situation near Izium in a Telegram post on Friday, writing that Russia potentially not being able to restore land communication lines between Izium and the city of Kupyansk in that timeline may also play a part in whether or not it withdraws. Russian forces may even have to leave Izium itself depending on if and when it embarks on its own counteroffensive against Ukrainian advances, he added. "The question of the time of the counterattack is very acute: if the enemy manages to gain a foothold in the positions reached, pull up artillery and air defense, then it will be extremely difficult for our units to t...

I've kept ruminating on the quote from C Wright Mills that appeared in the Washington Post piece I linked in yesterday's post: “[The power elite] are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.” But to that I added another, from Mills's The Power Elite : [T]he focus of elite attention has been shifted from domestic problems, centered in the ‘thirties around slump, to international problems, centered in the ‘forties and ‘fifties around war. Since the governing apparatus of the United States has by long historic usage been adapted to and shaped by domestic clash and balance, it has not, from any angle, had suitable agencies and tradi...