Dispatches from Vilnius

I was always curious what this meant after watching the movie many years ago.  Turns out it is just an expression for when the core components of a nuclear reactor burn through the containment vessel and figuratively cut through the earth's core to China.  As kids, my friends and I liked to joke when digging "fox holes" in the sand that we would dig all the way to China.  I guess nuclear engineers had the same sense of humor. Today it could be used to describe the situation with China over Russia.  Thanks to the Sinophobia on Capitol Hill, we have boxed China into a corner.  The harsh rhetoric reached a crescendo during the Trump administration and hasn't died down since.  Politicians are scrambling to put together a bill that would ban TikTok nationwide out of fear that the Chinese Communist Party (to use Matt Gaetz's words) would be privy to all our inner thoughts.  Not like the US government can't tap into social media anytime it wants, but no mat...

I thought it was a little weird getting so many notifications from blogger that several of my posts had been flagged for content.  They were old posts, one dating back to 2012, but I was curious the reason and sent feedback.  Usually, I get no response but I saw that all but one of the posts were reinstated the same day.  The blogger team decided to slap a warning on my post, dated 2014, about the infamous informant from the Watergate scandal.  I suppose some persons might think I was writing about the porn film from 1972. The flags came from some hacker bearing a grudge.  I've had problems in the past with persons leaving spam in the comments but never actually reporting me to blogger.  Whoever it was had picked out my posts on David Barton (2012), the 1619 Project (2020) and a piece I did on prosperity theology (2015).  I guess they pop up on Google searches as the posts came many years apart and I doubt the hacker actually trolled through all 2288 p...

The museums and galleries are free on the last Sunday of the month, so Daina and I finally took advantage of the open house and went to three exhibits that featured Ukrainian art and iconographic collections on loan to Lithuania.  The Boris Voznitsky collection is essentially in safe keeping until the war is over as there was fear an errant Russian missile might hit the gallery in Lviv.  The curators didn't want to risk losing the priceless collection of paintings from all over Europe. The collection is also a brutal reminder of what Lithuania lost in World War II.  Its noble families were eradicated and their collections lost forever.  Palaces fell into ruin during the Soviet years and memories virtually obliterated.  It's been a slow process in reclaiming this lost heritage.  Fortunately, many records still exist in Poland so art and architectural historians have been able to recover some of this valuable legacy. We run into this constantly in our work....

Trump was hoping to inspire another insurrection in New York over his presumed indictment.  The mayor even called up all 38,000 cops to patrol the streets in full uniform in case mass mobilization was needed.  The only problem was there was no indictment and no mass protests.  Only three to six persons pitched up for the rally with Jordan Klepper on hand to interview the handful of protestors.  Have we made too much of Trump's influence? Polls show he is still enormously popular among the conservative base, yet when it came time to mobilize his followers very few showed up.  His rallies in general have posted low numbers and commentators made fun of all the empty seats at his speech before CPAC earlier this month.  It seems that Trump's support is much softer than the numbers suggest. I don't think support for him has ever been very strong.  This is a guy who never topped 50 per cent in a weekly approval poll while president and still finds himself ...

I was walking with one of my young colleagues from the office last Friday when he told me he had gone down to Lviv with a small caravan the previous weekend to deliver supplies and three all-wheel-drive SUVs to Ukraine.  It was a private effort by one of his friends, who had collected all the goods but needed drivers to help him deliver them.  My colleague was glad to take part. It's a 14-hour drive to Lviv, which they did in a straight shot, spending the night and coming back the next day.  He said they were treated like dignitaries, given all sorts of gifts in return, including a military vest worn by one of the Ukrainian soldiers.  On the way back, the customs officer asked if he had looked through pockets.  No, he said.  The officer found a clip with a few bullets inside.  The clip was confiscated.  It was chalked up as an honest mistake. I was impressed but such good deeds are commonplace.  Lithuanians readily identify with Ukrainians an...

The founding congress of the International Movement of Russophiles was recently held at the Pushkin state museum in Moscow, attracting an interesting range of guests that included conspiracy theorists, Steven Seagal and an Italian princess who claims to be a cousin of the Romanovs.  It wasn't a very big gathering but the Kremlin reported that more than 40 countries were represented.  Sergei Lavrov gave the keynote address, lending the event the official imprimatur of the president. I think Lavrov had to be disappointed that some of the bigger names didn't show up.  At one time, Putin was hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Pamela Anderson, in an effort to save Russian wildlife from extinction.  However, the Hollywood stars kept their distance not wanting to be associated with the war in Ukraine. Of course, Lavrov used the opportunity to lash out at the neo-Nazi West, which brought a bunch of "here here's" from the assembly, among...

Ron DeSantis wading into the cultural war It's sad to see so many persons taking up the "woke" crusade and for the silliest of reasons.  Recently Ricky Gervais sounded off on Puffin Books' decision to excise the more nasty words from Roald Dahl's classic children's novels. Of course, Ricky quickly turned his concerns on himself, wondering if his work would similarly be edited after he's gone.  Don't worry, Ricky, you will be forgotten pretty quickly. However, it's not only comics who have mounted this anti-woke crusade.  Politicians have similarly vented their wrath on the "woke" crowd, and are actively taking measures to banish such sentiments from their states.  Newly elected Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee has banned the term "Latinx" from state documents, refusing to accept that anyone can officially be considered Latin binary.  Only about 3% of US Hispanics  use the word.  76 percent hadn't even heard of it before no...