Dispatches from Vilnius

Everything seemed to be going fine. The US and Canada were on the cusp of a mutually beneficial trade agreement that would have ended more than a year of bitter discord. Then entered Howard Lutnick , US Secretary of Commerce and one of the "architects" of Project 2025. He was unhappy with some of the proposals on the table and demanded they be removed, essentially throwing months of negotiations out the window. Lutnick being the asswipe that he is, blamed it on Canada's last second demands, particularly as the pertained to heavy-duty trucks, but Prime Minister Carney was having none of it. Lutnick's demands infringed on Canada's sovereignty and he called his negotiators back to Ottawa. Trump was left high and dry after boasting a deal would soon be struck because of his hardball tactics. Instead, he has nothing.  Now we see the countries poised to engage in a trade war that will hurt both sides but probably the US worse, as Americans import from Canada far more th...

Or the unmaking of The Odyssey We haven't heard much from the tech billionaire now that The Odyssey has itself become a billionaire. That's pretty impressive for a historical drama. Chris Nolan's magnum opus has grossed more than The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur , adjusted for inflation, films that commanded a huge audience in their day and became long-running syndicated movies on television. It makes you wonder if Elon will really risk making his own AI version given it is not likely he will top those numbers. Money has a way of shutting up people. Even Ben Shapiro was forced to concede it was "a grand spectacle with a fascinating moral core," although he still reserved criticism for some of the casting, calling Elliot Page a "pebble in the shoe - irritating, bothersome and unnecessary."  Page had a minor but very significant role as Sinon, a character lifted from The Aeneid that Nolan used to wrap a number of loose ends together in his three-hour ...

Some images are easy to spot as fake and give us a good laugh . Other images and stories seem tantalizingly real and so we spread them because they suit our cognitive bias. Facebook is filled with them. There is absolutely no fact-checking going on social media these days and so viral stories proliferate and find their way into feeds everywhere. Exhibit A:  Trump attacks Caitlin Clark — and gets a response he won’t soon forget. This one told the story of Trump accusing Clark of being "too woke" with Clark responding at a packed arena, “The president of the United States says athletes should stay quiet,” Clark began. “But sports have always been about more than wins and losses. They’re about teamwork, respect, and believing that everyone deserves a fair chance.” None of it is true but it played well on facebook. A friend of mine picked this story up and ran with it as it suited his views. Clark has actually been attacked for being silent on political issues, choosing to stay ...

It's amazing how easy it is for politicians and pundits to flip. A couple recent examples are John Fetterman and Bill Maher. Here they can be seen together on " Real Time " lamenting the direction the Democratic Party is taking and how they are seriously considering switching parties or voting for Republican candidates, VP Vance in Maher's case , whom he also recently interviewed.  To this point Fetterman has considered himself a Democrat. He even took a progressive stance in his 2022 run for the Senate before suffering a massive stroke. Takes a lot to bring down a big guy like that but he spent much of his campaign in the hospital. Since then it has been hard to tell where he stands. "Libertarian" perhaps? A convenient moniker for those who no longer want to align themselves with a political party, but here he was supporting Trump's ballroom because he thinks it will give the president better protection, Trump's foreign policy  including the Iran W...