In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As the saying goes, you don't have dementia if you forget your keys. You have dementia if you forget what your keys are for. President Brandon seems to have stepped all over not just his allies but his diplomatic advisers in Sunday's 60 Minutes interview , but I see no signs of dementia. The reaction at the Daily Kos was predictable to his announcement that the pandemic is over: 'You’re counting votes.' We are 'counting bodies': Experts outraged at Biden deeming pandemic over . But nobody seems to dispute that he was aware of his surroundings, knew this was a television interview, and was more or less aware of the questions and giving answers that reflected the overall context. The problem was that he basically hadn't done the prep. The public health establishment is at the very best deeply divided over what to do next with the pandemic; over the summer, it became clear that the public is fed up with vax and masks, and it quietly backed off on threats ...

Yesterday, I noted that prior to the first weeks of the Russo-Ukraine War, there was an effective consensus that Russia was the second-strongest military power and a near peer to the US and NATO. Trump has had a fair amount of criticism for remarks earlier this year that have been interpreted as "praising Putin", but I think if we take them in context of prevailing world opinion, they don't strike me as unusual. This piece at CNN lists some of Trump's remarks on Putin from last spring: At a campaign rally in Georgia [March 26], the former President, again, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart. And I actually thought he was going to be negotiating. I said, ‘That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 soldiers on the border.’” Trump added that Putin made a “big mistake,” but that “it looked...

The Austrian Col Markus Reisner is still highly regarded as a war analyst on reddit, but as I've noted, although he certainly looks the part, his recent commentary has been largely irrelevant, overtaken by events, and even disingenuous. On the other hand, the eponymous Kos at the left-wing Daily Kos has been consistently the most insightful and predictive throughout the war. Let's take an example. Here's last night's analysis from the Institute for the Study of War , which is actually a cut above their usual performance: Russian forces continue to conduct meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut instead of focusing on defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives that continue to advance. Russian troops continue to attack Bakhmut and various villages near Donetsk City of emotional significance to pro-war residents of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) but little other importance. . . . The Russians cannot hope to make gains around Bakhmut o...

Every couple of decades I seem to run into something that conveys the essence of the Ivy League as I experienced it as an undergraduate. My wife normally removes all communications from my alma mater from the incoming mail and quietly throws them out before I can see them, but around 20 years ago, she missed an invitation from a local alumni group to attend a lecture from one of the "superstar" (their word) professors who'd be visiting. I decided to attend. The lecture was so awful that I wound up getting involved in the ill-fated Dartmouth alumni trustee movement to see what I might do to change things. At least I didn't get a heart attack, and that's a different story anyhow, but it's an indicator of why my wife normally keeps that sort of thing away from me. Just lately, Yale has been running a series of YouTube lectures on Ukraine by one of their own superstars, Timothy Snyder . There's a link to one of them at the top of this post. I watched it...

I discovered a wide-ranging, multipart esasay by Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn in the USA , which can be found on the web but was first published in Church and State No.122, Oct-Dec 2015. His treatment of the subject is multidimensional and something I hadn't previously encountered, but it answers a lot of questions that had been in the back of my mind. I've read a lot of Solzhenitsyn, including all of The Gulag Archipelago , much of it at least twice. It came out in English in the mid-1970s, subtitled "an experiment in literary investigation", not long after I discovered Milton's prose, to which I think it bears a close if unintentional relation. Solzhenitsyn and Milton were deeply religious men, if highly idiosyncratic in their views, who bent literary genre to their highly idiosyncratic purposes. As a writer, I fell under the influence of both. Now in the context of the Russo-Ukraine War, there seems to be an emerging if so far inchoate movement to reevalua...

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...