In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Recently I ran across two essays that outline what I take to be the right-wing case against aiding Ukraine. I have some suspicion that neither is completely ingenuous, but I'll take their points at face value. The first is by Michael Walsh, 'Not Worth the Bones of a Single Grenadier' at a site called The Pipeline, which seems to carry National Review types like John O'Sullivan. He begins with an argument we'll see again: Bismarck was right about the Balkans, but he might as well have been speaking of the Ukraine, a troubled land (its name means "borderland"), oft-conquered, rarely independent, generally restive, and almost always miserable. Like the Kurds, the Ukrainians are for reasons of geography basically a people without a country. . . But the same might be said about half of Europe; Poland wasn't a country at all throughout the 19th century; Belgium didn't emerge until 1830 and has been twice invaded since then by Germany, which i...

I've noted here now and then that there's a schism within the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox denomination, arising from the dissolution of the Soviet Union but recently exacerbated by the Russo-Ukraine War. The Wikipedia entry on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) says, Prior to May 2022, the Primate of the UOC-MP was the most senior permanent member of the ROC's Holy Synod and thus had a say in its decision-making in respect of the rest of the ROC throughout the world. On May 27, 2022, the UOC declared its independence from the Moscow Patriarchate due to Patriarch Kirill's support of the invasion of Ukraine. Before its decision for full independence, more than 400 parishes had left the Moscow Patriarchate as a consequence of the invasion. Most recently Patriarch Kirill has tied the Orthodox faith directly to fighting in Ukraine : While celebrating the Divine Liturgy on Wednesday at the Zachatyevsky Monastery, which is traditio...

Via the UK Daily Mail -- there's not much on this in the US. Former President Trump said he hopes is 'wrong' about the possibility of World War III because the U.S. is being run by 'stupid people' at a rally in Wilmington, N.C. on Friday. 'I was right about Ukraine. I was right about what, Taiwan and I'm hoping I'm not going to be right about World War Three, because we have stupid people dealing,' the former president said, as he predicted the U.S. would lose a conflict to Russia. . . . 'Putin mentioned the N word,' Trump told the crowd. 'You know what the N word is? It's-- no, no, no, it's the nuclear word. You mentioned the N word yesterday. The nuclear were not supposed to be mentioned,' Trump continued, as he claimed the Russian invasion 'never would've happened' under his presidency. As far as I can tell, Trump's remarks in Wilmington mainly covered US domestic politics and focused on e...

Here's just another data point on the condition of the big guy's mind : President Joe Biden surprised viewers Friday when pausing his speech to acknowledge a woman in the crowd he said he knew when she was 12. “You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said during a speech at the National Education Association headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We go back a long way. She was 12 — I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.” Biden did not acknowledge how he knew the woman or what she did that helped him, but the remark caught viewers off guard. Videos of the remarks show a remarkably animated Biden as he recalls whatever the episode might have been: As opposed to his normal affectless. squint-eyed expression, he's flirty and even devilish as he alludes to some mutual memory that had to have been at least a bit naughty. A few commentators have noted that the audience, teachers' union members, giggled and tittered with the big guy. It...

After a two-month absence from YouTube, Austrian Col Reisner is back after only two weeks with another odd take on the Russo-Ukraine War. Let me preface this by saying yet again that I was thrown out of the ROTC after a year, and that's the full extent of my experience in the US or any other country's army. But here's my take on that war. Russia, thought to be the second-ranked military power on the planet, managed to bungle its invasion of Ukraine from the start. Within days, US generals were commenting that the Russian army was simply failing to meet its initial objectives, and this was with Ukraine's army having no Western resupply and fighting almost entirely with its existing stock of hand-held anti-tank weapons and cheap drones. Within months, still with hesitant Western support, Ukraine was able to force the Russians to retreat from their main line of attack, the effort to seize Kyiv. In the next phase of the war, Ukraine fought Russia to a stalemate with se...

So Scott Adams has inserted himself into the news : “Dilbert” author Scott Adams, who has been drawing the comic since 1989, said the strip that pokes fun at office culture was wiped from nearly 77 newspapers. Lee Enterprises, which owns nearly 100 newspaper companies in the US, terminated the contract with “Dilbert” for unknown reasons, reports Fox News. “It was part of a larger overhaul, I believe, of comics, but why they decided what was in and what was out, that’s not known to anybody except them, I guess,” said Adams, who noted it coincidentally happened after he incorporated “wokeness” into the stories. I've followed him long enough to recognize there's nothing new about this. In 2016, he supported Trump, and at the time, he complained that his speaking engagements fell to almost nothing -- and I think he recognized that Trump didn't sit well with the Silicon Valley types and tech workers who felt Adams was on their side. I watched his YouTube channel at t...

I'm convinced there's a latter-day George F Kennan now at the State Department who, like the one who wrote the Long Telegram, has the ear of some contemproary Averell Harriman, who in turn can tell important people what to do. Consider that the one area in which President Brandon has effectively recused himself in recent months has been Ukraine. Either Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, or Gen Milley articulates US Ukraine policy and says (or carefully omits to say) what weapons we are sending there. Early in the game, it seems the big guy contradicted Secretary Blinken on whether Ukraine would get third-party surplus Migs, but somehow the Migs happened anyhow, while the big guy effectively stopped talking about Ukraine. At all. Biden's tendency to ramble and interfere has been fairly well documented, for instance : The veteran Senator, as Obama saw it, had a tendency to “ramble, clearly loving every minute of it". The would-be President is said to have c...