Dispatches from Vilnius

Commemorating D-Day is typically a solemn occasion. Visiting dignitaries are asked to do one thing and one thing only - honor the dead. Approximately 70,000 allied soldiers died at the Battle of Normandy. Another 150,000 were wounded. This battle turned the tide in WWII, defeating Nazi Germany on a second front after the Soviet Union had pushed back the Nazis at Stalingrad. Yet, for whatever " grotesquely stupid " reason of his own, Petey Hegseth decided to turn this somber commemoration into an anti-immigration speech. The Trump administration has been busy stirring up trouble in Europe this year, hoping to turn elections across the continent. Immigration is their ideological weapon of choice. VP Vance had stumbled into the Henry Nowak murder case with little or no knowledge of what actually happened. Deputy PM David Lammy tried to set the Vice-President straight but to no avail because Vance had one aim and one aim only, to give his buddy Nigel Farage a chest bump in the e...

Trey Parker hit the nail on the head when he said, "we have a president who thinks his job is to be the joker." For the past year, he and Matt Stone have been skewering Trump on South Park but Trump does a better job on his own, especially with all the AI-generated images he has posted recently. This has made some speculate if Donnie might be a closet homosexual. You be the judge, He recently lavished a lot of attention on Jaxson Dart, the quarterback of the New York Giants who came out as a MAGA guy and highly supportive of the president. Donnie needs all the support he can get with his plummeting poll numbers.  For the record Jaxson is 6 feet 2 inches, and yet somehow manages to tower over the president. How can that be? After a third physical and a fourth cognitive test, Trump was described as healthy as ever, although he needed to drop 14 pounds to get back to a svelte 224. He looked rather chunky in his meeting with Xi last month. No explanation for the darkened hands ...

For weeks there have been war drones flying into Lithuanian air space. This is one of the drones we found in our back yard, figuratively speaking. None have exploded, but just their sheer presence is enough to bring the war home. Some are Ukrainian drones thrown off course by Russian radio signals. Others are unarmed Russian drones testing military response time. They all enter via Belarus, our malcontent neighbor forever anxious to stir something up. This despite all the overtures the US has shown Belarus in recent months in an effort to get Lukashenko to release political prisoners. Most of these " deals " require Lithuanian compliance in allowing the beleaguered republic to bring its potash to market. Surprisingly, Belarus controls over 20 percent of the global supply. However, on Wednesday it was different. A " red alert " flashed on both Daina's and my cellphone urging us to seek shelter immediately. There was an incoming drone from Belarus which the defen...

To hear Donald tell it, this was a trip of historic proportions. What other American president got to see where President Xi lived . Certainly not Joe Biden, who skipped on visiting China during his term of office. Trump was more than glad to tell everyone about it on Air Force One. Dotardly Don supposedly came back with all sorts of deals, or rather verbal agreements, for China to buy everything from Texas soybeans to Boeing planes  to light up the friendly skies between us. You may recall Donnie was none too happy with China last year, engaging in a trade war that left both sides fuming. All's good now. Trump thinks the world of Xi. He was particularly impressed with all the pageantry the Chinese authoritarian leader put on display especially for him, like those "happy and beautiful" children cheering Trump. It was " an honor like few have ever seen before. " See how easy it is to manipulate this manchild. Shortly afterward he was scolding Taiwan for overste...

"Victory" doesn't smell so sweet this time around as Vlad has not been able to deliver victory in Ukraine. You would think the autocrat would cut his losses, accept the fact that the Dnipro is his limit and amalgamate the "breakaway" provinces into the Russian federation, but no. Vlad wants all or nothing. He continues to demand Ukraine pull its forces from these embattled oblasts so that he can claim all of the Donbas and other disputed regions that straddle the Dnipro river. Well folks that ain't going to happen and why should it? This was never Vlad's land to begin with. He might have been able to make some claim to Crimea as Russia fought for and won it back in the 19th century (read Siege of Sevastopol by Tolstoy) only to include it as part of the Ukraine SSR during the Soviet Era. At the time the Soviet Union had no other means of providing state-run utilities except through Ukraine and so Stalin "gifted" this oblast to the Socialist Repu...

Cruise ships have zero appeal and this latest outbreak of hantavirus aboard the MV Hondius confirms my negative view. These ships have grown to gargantuan proportions since the days of The Love Boat , although the Hondius is relatively small for a cruise liner these days. I guess sailing across the Atlantic requires a more nimble ship than the typical floating casino hotel. What pleasure can you have on a ship this size of the Bellagio? The Royal Caribbean Icon of the Seas can house up to 7600 guests with a crew of over 2000. By comparison an aircraft carrier hosts between 4500 to 6000 military personnel. You put that many persons in such close quarters you have a contagion waiting to happen. The passengers were quarantined on Cape Verde as three deathly ill persons were evacuated from the ship, along with three bodies. All others were tested for the virus before the ship sailed onto Gran Canaria. Normally a hantavirus can only be passed from rodent to human but there is a special ...

It was nice to get away from Trumplandia for a while. I've been back less than two weeks and my mind has already become cluttered with him again. No way to escape the Orange Menace on television and social media.  I spent three weeks with my family in Japan. Our oldest daughter flew up from Sydney to meet us in Tokyo and from there we toured the country, taking in the bottom half of Hokkaido, the Kyoto area and back to Tokyo. Of course you can only catch a glimpse of a country like Japan in that short a time, like glimpsing Mt. Fuji first on the right side and then on the left as the Shinkansen bullet train sped past Hakone on our return from Kyoto. I had always thought Mt. Fuji was to the east of Tokyo. If nothing else I got a better sense of geography. So what stuck out to me on this trip? The first was that Tokyo didn't seem like a big city at all despite having nearly 15 million inhabitants. At street level the city seems like any other city, densely packed to be sure, but ...

Just when you thought it was safe to renew your passport, Herr Trump comes out with a special edition passport for 2026 bearing his likeness on the front page. Not even Hitler went this far in making Germany into his own likeness. The Fascist eagle and swastika were enough to symbolize his imperial reign. Not Trump, he wants the world to know he owns the United States.  Apparently, this special edition passport is elective and being offered at no additional charge. Maybe it is a way to get his MAGA cult to get a passport, as the majority of them don't have one, and with tougher ID laws due out for the November midterm elections, they may need one , but given Trump's ever-decreasing popularity this may prove an embarrassing venture with many of the Trump passports getting burned. It never ceases to amaze me how this man is so intent to get his name on things. He cancelled Biden's prescription drugs reduction program on his first day of office only to rebrand it his own, Tr...

The Fat Fuhrer and Melanoma just before shots rang out So much for Trump's glorious debut at the White House Press dinner. Karoline Leavitt did say " shots will be fired " and indeed they were, although not the shots anyone imagined. Too bad, Trump was going to do his own stand-up routine in lieu of a comedian. Better luck next year. Trump is feeling most of the heat from within his own MAGA base these days. There are a lot of unhappy campers that thought His Trumpness would bring down prices across the board. Instead, things have gotten worse under his reign leaving many with "liar's remorse" as the crew of " The View " described Tucker Carlson's mea culpa . Who knew Tucker had a younger brother named Buckley. I assume named after the great William F. Buckley, like his son. While Tucker may believe he is speaking for the disenfranchised, many within the MAGA base are giving their elected Congresspersons  an earful . Just ask Susan Collins at a...

After three weeks in Japan (more later) I would have thought Operation Epic Farce over by now, but the war lingers on without Dotardly Don having achieved a single one of his administration's goals. Whatever they were? It has gotten so bad that the Angry Orange is no longer allowed in the Situation Room after venting on his generals for not having located the downed pilots over Iran, or so the story goes. Hard to know what is fact or fiction anymore as the loudmouth has vented so many lies and misleading statements that no one seems to know what is going on inside the White House at this point. Chairman Pooh has stepped into the breach to proclaim China the only reliable alternative among the global hegemons, and sadly he is correct. Trump has squandered any capital the US had in terms of being the arbiter of peace and stability. The White House couldn't look more chaotic if it tried. He's lost all support from European leaders after their attempt to coddle him last yea...

I suppose if there is one good thing to come out of this war it is that the Gulf States are no longer considered a safe space for investors. The world of sports has been hit hard , as Saudi Arabia and other countries were working hard to lure boxing, F1 racing, football, tennis and golf to their sun-drenched borders, only to see that dry up over night. What were these sheiks to do with all their oil money? Now they watch their oil fields and refineries go up in smoke. Not that they won't rebound from these losses, but until then no more world heavyweight matches at the Kingdom Arena in Riyadh. It's been something to watch the sports world taken over by Saudi money. Not just the sports world but television and movie studios as well, as the Saudis had been putting up big bucks to get a share of the massive entertainment pie. They are major investors in the Paramount Sundance takeover of Warner Brothers, as the Ellisons had to do something to counter the Netflix offer of $84 billi...