The art of the Ukraine deal
Remember that minerals deal with Ukraine? Well, it’s been signed:
Ukrainian Economy Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko flew to Washington, D.C., Wednesday to help finalize the deal.
“On behalf of the Government of Ukraine, I signed the Agreement on the Establishment of a United States–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. Together with the United States, we are creating the Fund that will attract global investment into our country,” she wrote on X.
Upon taking office, President Donald Trump said he wanted Ukraine’s rare earth materials as a condition for continued U.S. support in the war. He described it as reimbursement for the billions of dollars of U.S. military assistance given to Ukraine.
How does CNN treat it? Like this: “Ukraine minerals deal is largely symbolic – but that’s enough for Donald Trump.” In other words, nothing much to see here – oh, and any credit belongs to Biden:
Ukraine’s minerals agreement with the United States stems from months of fraught haggling, and originates in a Ukrainian idea first offered during the amicable climes of the Biden administration. It has since become a persistent thorn in the side of Kyiv and Washington’s febrile relationship. President Volodymyr Zelensky had little choice but to sign something, or risk another seismic rupture in his relationship with President Donald Trump.
Yet the document CNN has seen sets the stage for a longer-term relationship between the US and Ukraine. It does not give an ironclad guarantee of American profits in the next years of the Trump administration.
Blahbity blah blah blah.
Russia is hardly pleased:
“Trump has finally pressured the Kyiv regime to pay for US aid with mineral resources,” Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Telegram.
“Now, the country that is about to disappear will have to use its national wealth to pay for military supplies.”
And the Trump administration is reported to be about to do this:
The Trump administration has told Congress that it intends to give the go-ahead for roughly $50 million of defense-related products to be exported to Ukraine through American industry sales direct to Kyiv, according to a new report.
I consider these developments tentatively positive steps, considering the depth and complexity of the problems in the area.
Roundup
(1) Mike Waltz is apparently out. That Signal thing seems to have been the proximate cause. [UPDATE: But he’s being nominated for UN ambassador.]
(2) Wildfires in Israel may have been arson:
An arson suspect was arrested Wednesday, as authorities were probing whether major brush fires west of Jerusalem were started intentionally and as calls appeared on Palestinian social media to start more blazes. However, authorities said Wednesday evening it was too early to determine the cause of the fires.
A 50-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s Umm Tuba neighborhood was arrested on suspicion of attempting to set fire to vegetation in southern Jerusalem, police said.
(3) Kamala’s back! She gave a speech; does anyone care?
(4) There’s been a rise in attacks by Muslims against Christians in Nigeria.
(5) The EPA is canceling nearly 800 “environmental justice” grants. See this for commentary at Ace’s.
(6) The German government wants to disarm members of their populist party of the right, AfD:
Members and supporters of the right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party are now facing mass gun license revocations. The reason? The German government has labeled the AfD a “right-wing extremist” group — a political designation that suddenly makes its members “unreliable” under the country’s gun laws. And just like that, firearms must be surrendered or destroyed. …
In 2021, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), designated the entire AfD as a “suspected threat to democracy.” That move allowed the government to surveil, wiretap, and investigate the party and its members. …
Courts have now upheld revoking gun licenses from AfD members, based solely on their political affiliation.
Our own gun rights are more robust, but the left would dearly love to change that.
Mayday!
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]
Today is Mayday.
As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”
That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.
But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun – weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.
Ah, the maypole. As children, who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?
The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times – a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.
They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made in the 1920s, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Manhattan Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.
The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.
Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.
I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I visited the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.
That’s how I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor – that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center – the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.
Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:
And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.
Open thread 5/1/2025
Unhappy anniversary: 50 years since the fall of Saigon
To the present-day Vietnamese it’s a happy anniversary, according to NPR:
Large, cheerful crowds of flag-waving people had been gathering in central Ho Chi Minh City since early Wednesday morning, many of them having camped here overnight.
The city became a sea of red – the color of Vietnam’s national flag. …
“It’s a grand celebration and I see in the Vietnamese a tremendous pride. They are proud to have defeated the French, the Americans and the Chinese,” said Jim Laurie, a veteran American journalist, who witnessed the fall of Saigon and who has returned to Vietnam many times over the years. …
“It’s a celebration of what they, the Vietnamese, have become and not what they were,” he said.
Fifty years is a long time. Most of the Vietnamese weren’t around back then, and to them it’s ancient history and the Communist Party and its “socialist-oriented market economy” is all they know. The bloodbaths are over.
To me, and I assume to most older Vietnamese who came to this country after the fall, and their descendants – it’s a sad reminder of an ignominious end to a long struggle against Communism. I’ve written about Vietnam many many times on this blog – in fact, it’s an entire category of posts numbering over a hundred, some of them personal including parts of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series. Here’s one of those posts.
Let us now take just a moment to reflect again on the fact that we dodged quite a bullet when Harris/Walz were defeated
[Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.]
2024 VP Democratic candidate Tim Walz is still giving interviews and talks. Here’s a report on his participation in a Harvard Kennedy School forum on Monday night:
Walz said Harris chose him, in part, because, “I could code talk to White guys watching football, fixing their truck” and “put them at ease.” The Minnesota governor described himself as the “permission structure” for White men from rural America to vote for Democrats.
That’s a good reminder of how the Harris/Walz ticket was one of the best demonstrations of the fact that racial and “gender” identity politics have swallowed the Democratic Party. After all, Harris was chosen because she’s a black woman – and it’s not just me saying that, it was Biden who explicitly said it. Turns out that wasn’t enough to win. And Walz is saying he was chosen because he’s some sort of rural macho white guy and therefore could talk the language of rural macho white guys, all while not talking their language at all. People who say “code talk” and “permission structure” aren’t likely to appeal much to that particular demographic.
Harris was and is a train wreck. Walz was and is a train wreck. It is shocking that they got as many votes as they did.
David Horowitz is dead at 86: RIP
Horowitz was the political changer extraordinaire, going not just from left to right but from leftist mover and shaker to becoming a huge force on the right. In both of those roles, but especially the latter – to which he devoted the last forty or so years of his life, churning out article and article and book after book, giving speech after speech and generating tactics and strategy – he was eloquent, insightful, and feisty. His work meant and means a great deal to me.
And boy, was he ever ahead of his time on so many issues. This article about him, which came out ten years ago, offers a summary of his political life:
[Horowitz underwent] a ten-year, slow-motion transformation from theorist of the Left to its worst enemy …
Indeed.
Horowitz knew politics from “both sides now,” and he devoted much of his time to understanding his own early role, his transformation, and the failure of many of his friends and colleagues to go the same route. Early on in that transformation he had experienced a dramatic and extremely serious disillusionment with the Black Panthers, who had committed the murder of a woman he had sent to work for them, and that was one catalyst:
His New Left outlook was unable to explain the events that had overtaken him; his lifelong friends and associates on the Left were now a threat to his safety, since they would instinctively defend the Panther vanguard; and no one among them really cared about the murder of an innocent woman, because the murderers were their political friends.
That’s the sort of thing that can lead to political change – even political reversal – in a thinking person who’s honest with himself.
Forced to look at his own commitments in a way he had never allowed himself to do before, Horowitz realized that it was the enemies of the Left who had been correct in their assessment of the Panthers, just as they had been correct in their assessment of the Soviet Union, while the Left had been disastrously wrong.
Also:
As the Indochinese tragedy unfolded, Horowitz was struck again by how the Left refused to hold itself accountable for the result it had fought so hard for — in this case, a Communist victory. It evidently could not have cared less about the new suffering of the people in whose name it had once purported to speak. He became increasingly convinced, as Peter Collier had tried to persuade him, that “the element of malice played a larger role in the motives of the left than I had been willing to accept.” If the Left really wanted a better world, why was it so indifferent to the terrible consequences of its own ideas and practices?
In November 1984, Horowitz turned another corner. He cast his first Republican ballot, for Ronald Reagan.
Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son was a book I read early on in my change experience. I was never a leftist nor were my parents (just regular Democrats of the mid-century), but a section of my family was from the same Communist milieu in which Horowitz had been raised, and so I was quite familiar with the genre. Some of them never left.
And see how ahead of his time he was when you contemplate these books he wrote and the years in which they were published:
Horowitz’s next book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, published in 1999, quickly became the most controversial work the author had written. It addressed the new cultural dimensions of the radical cause, specifically the determination to make race function the way class had in the traditional Marxist paradigm. …
In The Art of Political War (2002) Horowitz observes that progressives have inverted Clausewitz’s famous dictum and treat politics as “war continued by other means.” By contrast, conservatives approach politics as a debate over policy. …
… [I]n 2002, he launched a “Campaign for Fairness and Inclusion in Higher Education” to foster a pluralism of ideas and viewpoints, and in the spring of 2003 he drafted an “Academic Bill of Rights” based on the classic 1915 statement on academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors. Over the next seven years Horowitz attempted to persuade universities to adopt a code to ensure that students would have access to views on more than one side of controversial issues and that faculty would conduct themselves professionally in the classroom, and refrain from using their authority to indoctrinate students in partisan agendas. To advance these principles Horowitz wrote four books analyzing the situation he encountered on the several hundred campuses he visited during the seven years of his campaign: The Professors (2006), Indoctrination U. (2008), One-Party Classroom (2009; co-authored with Jacob Laksin), and Reforming Our Universities (2010). …
Unholy Alliance was the first book to trace the evolution of American radicalism from its support for the Soviet bloc to its opposition to the War on Terror and to explain how the Left and Islamist movements share a mindset that creates a bond between them. For the Left, America is the hated seat of global capitalism and individualism. For Islamists, America is the hated seat of Western values, a bulwark against the global domination of Islam, and a wellspring of spiritual iniquity. Consequently, these two destructive movements have a shared conception of, and contempt for, the “Great Satan” — America — which they identify as the primary source of evil in the world. They find common ground in their desire to annihilate or “fundamentally transform” it. …
… [A]nother book, this time co-authored with Jacob Laksin: The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future (2012). The new book documented and analyzed what no other work of scholarship had even noticed: that the Left had successfully built the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. The authors’ findings upended the conventional wisdom that the Republican party represents the rich and powerful, while the Democrats are “the party of the people.” The New Leviathan reveals how a powerful network moves radical ideas like Obamacare from the margins of the political mainstream and makes them the priority agendas of the Democratic party.
I’ll stop there, although Horowitz certainly didn’t – until now. RIP.
NOTE: Here is a post I wrote about Horowitz very early in my blogging career. I’ll add that I had an early correspondence with him at that time, and he was kind enough to reply and send me his latest book. I may write one more post about Horowitz, although not today.
Open thread 4/30/2025
The press would rather you think them abysmally stupid than deeply mendacious
They are seemingly united in trying to advance the notion that they didn’t notice what was obvious about Biden’s cognitive decline, rather than let you conclude that they lied about it in order to cover it up and to help Democrats and hurt the right. But if that is the case, why should we listen to reporters that stupid, that unobservant, that incurious?
Of course, they weren’t left with many good choices as an excuse for their abominable behavior. It’s “we were stupid!” or they admit “we lied.” Neither story is going to enhance their image, but I think “we’re stupid” might just be a worse message.
Now, I know it’s the case that they’re not literally saying “we’re stupid.” Instead, they’re saying, “we were deceived!” But that’s preposterous because Biden’s decline was so glaringly obvious.
However, here’s what they’re saying now:
Now that the election is over, those same reporters are trying to act as if they were deceived.
Several, notably CNN’s Jake Tapper, are publishing exposés of how the fraud was maintained, as if they didn’t know all along.
At Saturday’s dinner, Axios correspondent Alex Thompson made a show of lighting into the Biden administration for maintaining the fiction, and his fellow journalists for buying it.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said.
“Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves,” he continued. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story . . . We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”
But journalists didn’t “miss” the story. They lied about it.
The message the press is trying to give is that they were deceived by Biden’s “people.” It is so lame it’s absurd – but they must think the American public is cognitively challenged.
The Ruthless podcast has an amusing take on it all:
The history of Kristi Noem’s purse-snatcher
Perhaps you already know that Division of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s Gucci purse was stolen recently at a DC restaurant and that the thief (actually, thieves, although there was one main player) has been arrested.
It’s as though he was sent by Central Casting. Take a look at this history – “illegal alien” is just the tip of a substantial iceberg:
Mario Bustamante-Leiva, 49, of Santiago, was arrested Saturday after he allegedly made off with the luxury shoulder bag while Noem, 53, was at an Easter outing with her family at the Capital Burger in Washington, DC, sources told The Post.
Bustamante-Leiva, who is in the US illegally, is believed to be part of a large East Coast robbery organization.
Cops later arrested a second suspect — another illegal migrant — in Miami and are holding him on a deportation notice while finalizing charges, according to sources.
The two suspects allegedly work together and have committed similar robbery schemes across the country, the sources said.
So not just an illegal alien, but a habitual criminal illegal alien working with another habitual criminal illegal alien. How was Bustmnte-Leiva caught? For starters, the entire thing was recorded on a security camera.
But wait, that’s just the beginning. Bustamante-Leiva has been getting around (that link is from March of 2015):
One of London’s most prolific thieves has been jailed for three years after stealing £21,000 worth of phones, wallets and computers during a five-month crime spree.
Jobless father-of-three Mario Bustamante-Leiva, 39, of no fixed address, wore a flat cap and a large overcoat even in the height of summer in order to conceal his pickings.
The Chilean national trawled exclusive bars, restaurants and coffee shops looking for laptops, mobile phones, iPods and tablets.
The Old Bailey heard in one case he even stole a bag containing an entire family’s passports and airplane boarding passes.
Police have released CCTV footage which shows the brazen thief swipe an unsuspecting woman’s handbag from under her nose as she chats with a friend.
This guy saw no meed to change tactics, despite having been caught on camera before.
So, how did he get in here without being detected as a criminal? (Yes, it’s a rhetorical question.) How long has he been here, doing this? How large is the criminal ring? And lastly – will the left take up his cause as their latest hero?
So Canada votes to continue on its present leftward course
I don’t think the victory of Liberal Mark Carney as Canada’s new prime minister should be any sort of surprise. Polls have been predicting it, for one thing. But more importantly, leftward is the direction in which Canada has been going for at least ten years. Canada and the US are very different countries with very different traditions, and although I cannot say how much Trump’s bluster and threats towards Canada influenced the outcome, I think I am safe in claiming that Trump certainly didn’t help the Conservative cause in Canada at all.
In sum, however, Canadians are responsible for their own political decisions.
The Liberal victory didn’t give the Liberal Party a majority, however:
As the votes were counted through the night, the Liberals were just shy of a majority government, which would mean the governing party would need the support of what is left of the NDP and the Quebec sovereigntist Bloc Québécois party.
On a stage surrounded by dozens of supporters early Tuesday, Carney thanked Poilievre to a decidedly muted response from his supporters before turning a laser focus on Trump.
“America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” Carney said.
“These are not these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never, ever happen. But we also must recognize the reality that our world has fundamentally changed,” he said.
You can see why I say that Trump’s rhetoric and actions became a helpful issue for the Liberals. I’m not sure what that “decidedly muted response” is about, but perhaps there is already some buyers’ remorse, just as there is in Britain for Starmer.
The losing Conservative, Poilievre, had this to say:
“We got the highest share vote our party has received since 1988,” Poilievre added. “We didn’t quite get over the finish line, yet we know that change is needed. But change is hard to come by. It takes time.”
I’m not sure what it would take, but certainly not just time.
More insight into the election can be found in the Edmonton Journal, a Canadian paper based in Alberta (probably the most conservative area of Canada). The situation seems to have been somewhat like what happened in France and in Britain, in that the left was uncharacteristically united in order to stop the right:
Poilievre led his Conservative Party to its greatest height ever, at least if you go by popular vote. Stephen Harper’s CPC peaked at 39.6 per cent in the 2011 election. But more than 42 per cent of Canadians voted for Poilievre’s CPC in this 2025 general election.
But there was just one problem. For the first time since it formed in 2003, the CPC faced a largely united left-of-centre, with Mark Carney’s Liberals getting roughly 43 per cent of the vote.
That result will give the Liberals roughly 160 seats to 150 for the CPC, not enough for a Liberal majority, but enough to shake Alberta politics, bringing on calls for separation from angry Albertans …
The author of the piece seems to agree that Canada is basically a liberal/left nation – and that if that segment of the populace unites, the right will not be able to win. In this case, the more leftist party than the Liberals united with the Liberals to defeat the Conservatives. However, even the Conservatives tried to distance themselves from Trump:
It wasn’t until former [Conservative Party] leader Stephen Harper said he’d rather burn Canada to the ground than give an inch to the blowhard Trump that the CPC found its own footing. By then, it was too late. Carney had won over Canada’s gigantic anti-Trump faction with trumped-up fears that Trump was going to steal our land and our water.
Wow, talk about NeverTrumpers! “Burn Canada to the ground” – that’s quite an extraordinary statement from Harper. But it shows the depth of how much Trump’s recent threats are detested in Canada, even by the supposed right.