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...

I've tried to avoid talking about Trump for the past two years, but my conservative friends keep posting memes like this one on facebook.  The meme comes on the heels of Trump giving out bottled water at East Palestine, Ohio, after the toxic train derailment last week.  Conservatives were upset that Biden would travel to Ukraine rather than deal with domestic catastrophes back home.  Trump being Trump saw a golden opportunity to peddle his new brand of bottled water, Trump Natural Spring Water , which I well imagine will be available on his website soon. Many conservatives are still under the deluded belief that Trump somehow gives of himself at his campaign rallies, forgetting how much money he siphons off campaign contributions. They honestly think Trump sacrificed himself for the good of the nation, by giving up his presidential salary, despite numerous accounts of how much his family businesses profited off his presidency .   Apparently, his brand is s...

We were of two minds on the book fair this year.  It's always fun to see what's new in the Lithuanian publishing world but at the time we didn't want to deal with all the people and we knew we would end up more money than we should.  In the end, curiosity won out and we went as early as possible to avoid the rush.  The music section has grown tremendously with the advent of vinyl in recent years.  Every local artist is now hocking their vinyls but it was the release of a two-volume Kernagis album that I wanted, put out by his children on their own label, a loving tribute to their father who passed away 13 years ago.  Tarp Girnų is Kernagis at his playful, a collection of cabaret songs, mostly his own but with a few of his favorite songs thrown in for good measure. He's one of the few Lithuanian musicians that I really enjoyed, a rousing mix of folk and rock ballads that recall the marvelously experimental time of the 60s, although he began building his repertoi...

We watch a lot of Polish and independent Russian news on cable television, as they offer segments not seen on the Western European channels.  Last night, the Polish channel was showing the latest Belarusian propaganda coming out of Minsk.  Not one to miss out on a current trend, the commentator noted sardonically, President Lukashenko has urged citizens to make trench candles.  No doubt the wily president had seen all the attention Ukraine was getting in supplying trench candles to the front line and thought he might seize on the initiative. Lukashenko has a habit of stealing from others and trying to call the spoils his own.  For years, he was happy to be spearheading the effort to push Belarus into the 21st century by modernizing Minsk.  He was very proud of the "rhombicuboctahedron" national library that was built in 2006.  Yes that is a word .  This was going to be the new face of the capital city.   However, people began yearning for a...

At 94 it is hard to really feel sorry about Burt Bacharach's passing , especially since his music will live on forever.  I think no one did more to define the elegant pop song than Burt, putting together a string of hits that defied convention.  His favorite chanteuse was Dionne Warwick, collaborating with her on a great number of songs, including my favorite Walk On By .  As someone described, his songs always had an element of surprise with unexpected chord shifts and nimble arrangements that made a pop song seem oddly operettic. Of course, having someone with such a beautiful voice sing these songs only made them more special. As the story goes, this combination was purely accidental.  Burt and Hal David were looking for someone to make a demo of Make It Easy on Yourself and hired Dionne.  When she found out they had given the song to Jerry Butler  she was hurt.  It was then that they realized they were missing out on a golden opportunity to work w...

With all this " de-aging " in Hollywood movies, it won't be long before they do away with the original actors all together and replace them with avatars, a la James Cameron's "blue world."  I see there are also anti-aging apps available for your cellphone and tutorials on YouTube so that you too can recapture your youthful glow, if looking back at old pictures isn't good enough.  I'd be lying if sometimes I wished I was 30 years younger when I saw a pretty young woman smile at me, but then it's an easily dismissed reverie. Star Trek foreshadowed this with  The Menagerie , two episodes that cleverly repackaged the pilot movie in which Spock hijacks the Enterprise to take the badly deteriorated figure of Captain Pike back to the notorious planet Talos IV.  Once there, Pike was restored to his youthful self and reunited with Vina to live the blissful life that had been denied him, albeit illusory. For the most part this de-aging doesn't any serv...