Monthly Archives: August 2023
Ukraine’s Vain Search For Wonder Weapons – by Dog Bandow (The American Conservative) Archived – 24 Aug 2023
Archived … https://archive.is/uDeqZ
Even when President Joe Biden was visiting the fire-ravaged Hawaiian island of Maui, his attention was mostly on Ukraine, for which he was asking another $24 billion in assistance. His proposal hints of desperation. With Kiev’s highly anticipated counteroffensive running down with minimal success, Ukrainian officials are more loudly demanding more arms with which to revive their fortunes.
Indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sounds a bit like the Germans in 1944, who put their declining military hopes in “wunderwaffen,” or wonder weapons. German engineers achieved some notable successes, deploying jet aircraft and ballistic and cruise missiles, but technological miracles could not stem the irresistible flood of American, British, and Soviet forces. A Biden administration official addressed Ukrainian demands for F-16 aircraft and longer-range missiles: “The problem remains piercing Russia’s main defensive line, and there’s no evidence these systems would’ve been a panacea.”
The Zelensky government’s likelihood of achieving its stated aims, the defeat of Moscow and recovery of Ukrainian lands, including the Donbass and Crimea, looks increasingly small. For instance, reported the Washington Post: “The US intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol,” which, “should it prove correct, would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push.” Another news account found U.S. officials “increasingly critical of Ukraine’s counteroffensive strategy and gloomy about its prospect of success.” Ukraine’s efforts faintly echo the Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany’s last gasp offensive which consumed precious weapons, fuel, and manpower that could have helped delay the Red Army’s advance in the east.
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US Labor Union – UPS Workers: How To Win the Strike (Rumble) 27 July 2023
Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast’ Considered – 19 June 2023
I read this book in college in my Freshman year. I have been thinking about Hemingway’s lost suitcase of stories for the decades since. In the work of a remembrance of what life was like for Hemingway when he was in his twenties in Paris in the 1920’s.
I must say I like this work much better than the recently read “To Have and Have Not.” The characters in “To Have and Have Not” are fictional and based on real people, but the ‘characters’ in “A Moveable Feast” are based on real people who I have some background knowledge of since they are noted writers.
I liked reading about Hemingway’s dealings with the insufferable Lesbian Literary Dowager Gertrude Stein. Apparently Stein got to be a kind of “Pope” of avant garde writing and painting ‘scene’ in Paris in the 1920’s. Stein struck the fancy of a wealthy American who then financed different projects and magazines and shows for artists to expose their work to a wider audience.
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Text of “A Moveable Feast” – by Hemingway – At Faded Page – https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20141111
One of the interesting parts of the book is where Hemingway goes to help F. Scott Fitzgerald go to a repair shop to get Fitzgerald’s car. Fitzgerald’s strange wife Zelda comes into the story. She was quite a character having gotten Fitzgerald to write a book about falling in love with her disguised as “The Great Gadsby.” The apparently some what ‘lower class’ Fitzgerald had wanted her and not gotten her, and then got her. Zelda was an attractive talkative woman who enjoyed interacting with people and men. She has inspired the naming of many things since she took up with Fitzgerald.
In the book Hemingway says that she leaned into his ear once at a party and said that “x was more popular than Jesus”
xenagoguevicene 