No, Ukraine is not about peace vs. justice

 History, Politics  No Responses »
May 312022
 

Apparently, a growing number of people are framing the question concerning Russia’s war in Ukraine in terms of peace vs. justice. Peace would mean some kind of a settlement to end the fighting now, even if it means granting, e.g., territorial concessions to Russia to avoid humiliating Putin. In contrast, continuing to fight for Ukraine’s liberation is about justice.

In my view, it is dangerously wrong to present Russia’s war of aggression in these terms. Peace without justice is simply not possible. Believing otherwise amounts to repeating the tragic errors of 1938: When Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, triumphantly returned from the Munich conference carrying a document with Hitler’s signature, declaring that he brought “peace for our time”.

We all know how long “our time” lasted. The grand total of 11 months.

That’s what peace without justice looks like. A despot like Putin is only encouraged by what he sees as weakness, signs of the cowardly decadence of the West. And just as he has now done repeatedly (!) in the past, he will happily ignore any agreement he signs today once he sees an opportunity, once he thinks that conditions are in his favor.

No. We must categorically reject such compromise. Much as we desire peace, we must not confuse lasting, robust peace with an armistice that only allows the despot to regroup, learn from his lessons, and start his aggression anew at the first viable opportunity. And his success might encourage other nations to resort to armed aggression, knowing that the West is too weak, too divided to stand up against them.

It is an unfortunate fact of human history that sometimes the shortest, surest route to “peace for our time” is through the battlefield. I wish the war stopped right now, with no more suffering, no more destruction, no more killing. But if the price we will likely pay is a greater, deadlier war tomorrow, I’d rather we do what it takes to avoid it.

And yes, I recognize that it’s easy for me to say these things from the comfort of an armchair in a peaceful city many thousands of miles away from Ukraine. But you know what? It’s also easy to speculate about these things in Washington or Brussels. How about we ask the Ukrainians? Do they want peace now, even with concessions? Or do they prefer to liberate their homeland and ensure that the Russians will be in no mood to attack again anytime soon?

Because this, after all, is the other lesson of 1938. Nobody asked the Czechs. The decision was made by the great powers without consulting those who would actually be paying the price in blood.

 Posted by at 5:38 pm

This is just the beginning

 History, Politics  No Responses »
May 262022
 

News on CNN: Apparently hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are now in “filtration camps” in Russia. That is to say, concentration camps.

Make no mistake about it, this is just the beginning of evil. As the West continues to flirt with various forms of authoritarianism or illiberalism, Russia has gone full-blown Nazi, with a war of conquest, severe oppression at home, an idolized leader and a national ideology of predestined greatness held back only by some evil international conspiracy.

Our only hope… ONLY hope is that they remain as incompetent and as corrupt as they are, with an ill-prepared military using substandard training and equipment as monies have been syphoned away to finance the oligarchs’ superyachts, and with a Ukrainian nation more capable of defending itself against this horrific aggression than anyone thought possible.

But so long as we have elder statesmen like Kissinger advocating a Munich-style appeasement, the world remains in danger. Bullies cannot be appeased; it just encourages them to come back and ask for more. Kissinger, of all people, should be intimately aware of this lesson of history.

And even if escalation is avoided, the fallout of the conflict, especially the looming global food crisis, can be devastating.

All it takes is a couple of generations to forget the lessons of history and start anew. So we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

 Posted by at 8:03 pm

Differentiation

 Mathematics, Personal, Physics  No Responses »
May 252022
 

From time to time, I promise myself not to respond again to e-mails from strangers, asking me to comment on their research, view their paper, offer thoughts.

Yet from time to time, when the person seems respectable, the research genuine, I do respond. Most of the time, in vain.

Like the other day. Long story short, someone basically proved, as part of a lengthier derivation, that general relativity is always unimodular. This is of course manifestly untrue, but I was wondering where their seemingly reasonable derivation went awry.

Eventually I spotted it. Without getting bogged down in the details, what they did was essentially equivalent to proving that second derivatives do not exist:

$$\frac{d^2f}{dx^2} = \frac{d}{dx}\frac{df}{dx} = \frac{df}{dx}\frac{d}{df}\frac{df}{dx} = \frac{df}{dx}\frac{d}{dx}\frac{df}{df} = \frac{df}{dx}\frac{d1}{dx} = 0.$$

Of course second derivatives do exist, so you might wonder what’s happening here. The sleight of hand happens after the third equal sign: swapping differentiation with respect to two independent variables is permitted, but \(x\) and \(f\) are not independent and therefore, this step is illegal.

I pointed this out, and received a mildly abusive comment in response questioning the quality of my mathematics education. Oh well. Maybe I will learn some wisdom and refrain from responding to strangers in the future.

 Posted by at 11:46 pm

SciShow video on our Solar Gravitational Lens work

 Astronomy, Personal, Physics, Space  No Responses »
May 232022
 

This morning, Google greeted me with a link in its newsstream to a Hackaday article on the Solar Gravitational Lens. The link caught my attention right away, as I recognized some of my own simulated, SGL-projected images of an exo-Earth and its reconstruction.

Reading the article I realized that it appeared in response to a brand new video by SciShow, a science-oriented YouTube channel.

Yay! I like nicely done videos presenting our work and this one is fairly good. There are a few minor inaccuracies, but nothing big enough to be even worth mentioning. And it’s very well presented.

I suppose I should offer my thanks to SciShow for choosing to feature our research with such a well-produced effort.

 Posted by at 7:22 pm

Incredible storm

 Local Ottawa, Weather and Climate  No Responses »
May 232022
 

Saturday afternoon was stormy. The lights flickered a bit during the storm, my UPSs came online several times. But then the storm left, and everything was back to normal.

At least here in Lowertown.

I didn’t check the news, so it was not until later Sunday that I learned, from a social media post from a friend who has been without power since, just how bad things really got.

And how bad they still are.

Hydro Ottawa’s map is still mostly red. Now “only” about 130,000 customers are affected, which is certainly less than the peak of well over 170,000, but to put that into perspective, Hydro Ottawa has a total of less than 350,000 customers; that means that at one point, more than half the city was without power.

As a Hydro official said on CTV News tonight, their distribution system is crushed.

And then there are all the downed trees, destroyed traffic lights, not to mention severely damaged homes and businesses. Not quite a like a war zone (of which we had seen plenty on our TV screens, courtesy of Mr. Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine) but close.

And of course the damage doesn’t stop at Hydro Ottawa’s borders: Hundreds of thousands more are without power in Eastern Ontario and also Quebec.

 Posted by at 7:13 pm

Dear Russia

 History, Politics  No Responses »
May 122022
 

Dear Russia,

In the wake of Finland’s imminent decision to join NATO, you threaten again. You present yourself as the victim of aggression by Nazis.

So let’s take stock. Who did what in Europe since 1945?

In 1953, you used your military force to crush an uprising against hardline communist tyranny in East Germany.

In 1956, you did the same thing in Budapest, inflicting severe damage on my city of birth, still recovering from the devastations of WW2.

In 1968, you crushed the Prague Spring with tanks.

Kudos to you: You refrained from the direct use of military force in Poland in 1980, though you supported the regime that imposed martial law.

After the Soviet collapse, as the newly independent Russian Federation you supported separatists in the Transnistria region of Moldova.

You waged not one but two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s, with tens of thousands killed and cities like Grozny leveled.

In 2008, you launched a war against Georgia, seizing territory and creating two phony mini-republics.

In 2014, you launched another war, against Ukraine, seizing the Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, creating a permanent war zone, even shooting down a civilian airliner that flew over the area on a scheduled route.

And now you attempted a full-scale war, hoping to decapitate Ukraine, Blitzkrieg-style, and resorting to horrific, genocidal tactics of purposefully targeting civilians when your ineptitude and Ukrainian resistance thwarted your plans.

But you are the good guys. I get it. Meanwhile, what did evil, imperialist, Nazi NATO do? How many times were you attacked by NATO nations? What territories were seized by NATO?

Oh, I get it. NATO bombed Belgrade. Never mind that the goal was not to seize territory or even change a regime, simply to stop the (now well-documented) ongoing genocide in Kosovo. Because, I get it, that’s what Nazis do: they stop genocide. And you, the good guys?

This video speaks for itself.

Still wondering why Finland is keen on joining NATO?

They don’t want to end up like this hapless car dealership owner and his security guard.

Killed by Putler’s Russist thugs.

 Posted by at 5:57 pm

Twenty years later

 History, Internet, Personal  No Responses »
May 092022
 

It’s now Monday, May 9, 2022. And it is an anniversary of sorts.

No I am not talking about Putin and his planned “victory” parade, as he is busy desecrating the legacy of the Soviet Union’s heroic fight in the Great Patriotic War against a genocidal enemy.

I am referring to something much more personal. This sentence:

I watched The Matrix, for the first time. I’ve seen Dark City, and I loved it. I have heard all sorts of bad things about The Matrix, so I had low expectations. I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe not as well done as Dark City, it was nevertheless a surprisingly intelligent movie for a blockbuster.

Not very profound or insightful, is it.

But it happens to be my first ever blog entry, written when I still refused to call a blog a “blog”, calling it instead my “Day Book”, in the tradition of the late Jerry Pournelle.

So there. Will I be around twenty years from now? Perhaps more pertinently, will the world as we know it still be around?

What can I say? I am looking forward to marking the 40th anniversary of my blog on May 9, 2042, with another blog entry, hopefully celebrating a decent, prosperous, safe, mostly peaceful world.

 Posted by at 3:01 am

Oh, those Romans…

 History  No Responses »
May 072022
 

There are things I am learning about the Roman Empire that I never knew. What a magnificent society it really was.

For instance, the Romans were not only master builders of sewers and roads, but also invented traffic management. Julius Caesar restricted the use of private vehicles to the last two hours of daylight. Business deliveries had to be made at night.

The Embattled Driver in Ancient Rome

What blew me away, however, was their use of… plumbing? I mean, aqueducts are one thing, but to have bona fide valves, water faucets in businesses and homes? Now that blew me away.

And speaking of sewers, the Romans might have been master sewer builders but it appears some form of a sewer system may have existed almost ten thousand (!!!) years earlier in a settlement in Anatolia. That’s just… wow.

 Posted by at 11:49 pm

No, a single Einstein ring snapshot won’t do the trick with the SGL

 Astronomy, Personal, Physics, Space  No Responses »
May 062022
 

A beautiful study was published the other day, and it received a lot of press coverage, so I get a lot of questions.

This study shows how, in principle, we could reconstruct the image of an exoplanet using the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) using just a single snapshot of the Einstein ring around the Sun.

The problem is, we cannot. As they say, the devil is in the details.

Here is a general statement about any conventional optical system that does not involve more exotic, nonlinear optics: whatever the system does, ultimately it maps light from picture elements, pixels, in the source plane, into pixels in the image plane.

Let me explain what this means in principle, through an extreme example. Suppose someone tells you that there is a distant planet in another galaxy, and you are allowed to ignore any contaminating sources of light. You are allowed to forget about the particle nature of light. You are allowed to forget the physical limitations of your cell phone’s camera, such as its CMOS sensor dynamic range or readout noise. You hold up your cell phone and take a snapshot. It doesn’t even matter if the camera is not well focused or if there is motion blur, so long as you have precise knowledge of how it is focused and how it moves. The map is still a linear map. So if your cellphone camera has 40 megapixels, a simple mathematical operation, inverting the so-called convolution matrix, lets you reconstruct the source in all its exquisite detail. All you need to know is a precise mathematical description, the so-called “point spread function” (PSF) of the camera (including any defocusing and motion blur). Beyond that, it just amounts to inverting a matrix, or equivalently, solving a linear system of equations. In other words, standard fare for anyone studying numerical computational methods, and easily solvable even at extreme high resolutions using appropriate computational resources. (A high-end GPU in your desktop computer is ideal for such calculations.)

Why can’t we do this in practice? Why do we worry about things like the diffraction limit of our camera or telescope?

The answer, ultimately, is noise. The random, unpredictable, or unmodelable element.

Noise comes from many sources. It can include so-called quantization noise because our camera sensor digitizes the light intensity using a finite number of bits. It can include systematic noises due to many reasons, such as differently calibrated sensor pixels or even approximations used in the mathematical description of the PSF. It can include unavoidable, random, “stochastic” noise that arises because light arrives as discrete packets of energy in the form of photons, not as a continuous wave.

When we invert the convolution matrix in the presence of all these noise sources, the noise gets amplified far more than the signal. In the end, the reconstructed, “deconvolved” image becomes useless unless we had an exceptionally high signal-to-noise ratio, or SNR, to begin with.

The authors of this beautiful study knew this. They even state it in their paper. They mention values such as 4,000, even 200,000 for the SNR.

And then there is reality. The Einstein ring does not appear in black, empty space. It appears on top of the bright solar corona. And even if we subtract the corona, we cannot eliminate the stochastic shot noise due to photons from the corona by any means other than collecting data for a longer time.

Let me show a plot from a paper that is work-in-progress, with the actual SNR that we can expect on pixels in a cross-sectional view of the Einstein ring that appears around the Sun:

Just look at the vertical axis. See those values there? That’s our realistic SNR, when the Einstein ring is imaged through the solar corona, using a 1-meter telescope with a 10 meter focal distance, using an image sensor pixel size of a square micron. These choices are consistent with just a tad under 5000 pixels falling within the usable area of the Einstein ring, which can be used to reconstruct, in principle, a roughly 64 by 64 pixel image of the source. As this plot shows, a typical value for the SNR would be 0.01 using 1 second of light collecting time (integration time).

What does that mean? Well, for starters it means that to collect enough light to get an SNR of 4,000, assuming everything else is absolutely, flawlessly perfect, there is no motion blur, indeed no motion at all, no sources of contamination other than the solar corona, no quantization noise, no limitations on the sensor, achieving an SNR of 4,000 would require roughly 160 billion seconds of integration time. That is roughly 5,000 years.

And that is why we are not seriously contemplating image reconstruction from a single snapshot of the Einstein ring.

 Posted by at 4:01 pm

Gilead

 Politics  No Responses »
May 032022
 

I am beginning to wonder if the American political system is truly broken beyond repair.

I wonder what this means for Canada. No change? Will we become a safe haven for refugees from Gilead, as in The Handmaid’s Tale? Or will we be this new America’s Ukraine?

I am afraid that we will find out.

 Posted by at 12:36 am

Drawing circles in the 8-bit world

 Computer Games, Programming  No Responses »
Apr 272022
 

Someone reminded me that 40 years ago, when we developed games for the Commodore-64, there were no GPUs. That 8-bit CPUs did not even have a machine instruction for multiplication. And they were dreadfully slow.

Therefore, it was essential to use fast and efficient algorithms for graphics primitives.

One such primitive is Bresenham’s algorithm although back then, I didn’t know it had a name beyond being called a forward differences algorithm. It’s a wonderful, powerful example of an algorithm that produces a circle relying only on integer addition and bitwise shifts; never mind floating point, it doesn’t even need multiplication!

Here’s a C-language implementation for an R=20 circle (implemented in this case as a character map just for demonstration purposes):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

#define R 20

void main(void)
{
    int x, y, d, dA, dB;
    int i;
    char B[2*R+1][2*R+2];

    memset(B, ' ', sizeof(B));
    for (i = 0; i < 2*R+1; i++) B[i][2*R+1] = 0;

    x = 0;
    y = R;
    d = 5 - (R<<2);
    dA = 12;
    dB = 20 - (R<<3);
    while (x<=y)
    {
        B[R+x][R+y] = B[R+x][R-y] = B[R-x][R+y] = B[R-x][R-y] =
        B[R+y][R+x] = B[R+y][R-x] = B[R-y][R+x] = B[R-y][R-x] = 'X';
        if (d<0)
        {
            d += dA;
            dB += 8;
        }
        else
        {
            y--;
            d += dB;
            dB += 16;
        }
        x++;
        dA += 8;
    }

    for (i = 0; i < 2*R+1; i++) printf("%s\n", B[i]);
}

And the output it produces:

                XXXXXXXXX                
             XXX         XXX             
           XX               XX           
         XX                   XX         
        X                       X        
       X                         X       
      X                           X      
     X                             X     
    X                               X    
   X                                 X   
   X                                 X   
  X                                   X  
  X                                   X  
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
  X                                   X  
  X                                   X  
   X                                 X   
   X                                 X   
    X                               X    
     X                             X     
      X                           X      
       X                         X       
        X                       X        
         XX                   XX         
           XX               XX           
             XXX         XXX             
                XXXXXXXXX

Don’t tell me it’s not beautiful. And even in machine language, it’s just a few dozen instructions.

 Posted by at 1:21 am

How not to write about vaccinations

 Health, Politics  No Responses »
Apr 252022
 

I am reading an article in The Globe and Mail, with an attention-grabbing headline: Unvaccinated disproportionately risk safety of those vaccinated against COVID-19, study shows.

Except that the actual study shows no such thing. Nor does it involve actual vaccines or actual people.

What the study shows is that the simple (dare I say, naive) epidemiological model known as the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Removed) model, when applied to a combination of two (vaccinated vs. unvaccinated) populations, indicates that the presence of the unvaccinated significantly increases the chances of infection among the vaccinated as well.

D’oh. Tell us something we didn’t know.

But the point is, this is a purely theoretical study. The math is elementary. The results are known (in fact, it makes me wonder why this paper was published in the first place; it’s not that it is wrong per se, but it really doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know simply by looking at the differential equations that characterize the SIR model.) Moreover, the actual nuances of COVID-19 (mutations, limited and waning vaccine efficacy, differences between preventing infection vs. preventing hospitalization, death, or “long COVID” — in other words, all those factors that make CODID-19 tricky, baffling, unpredictable) are omitted.

So what will such a study accomplish? The authors’ point is that the model’s simplicity is a strength, as it also offers transparence and flexibility. I think in actuality, it will just muddy the waters. Those who are opposed to vaccination, especially mandatory vaccination, will call this study bogus and naive, an example of ivory tower theorizing with no solid foundations in reality. Conversely, some of those who are in favor of vaccination will present this paper as “proof” that the unvaccinated are selfish, irresponsible extremists who should be marginalized, ostracized by civilized society.

The Globe and Mail article is already evidence of this viewpoint. A quote from one of the study’s authors serves as a representative example: “In particular, when you have a lot of mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, the unvaccinated people actually get protected by the vaccinated people, who act as a buffer – but that comes at a cost to the vaccinated.”

Does anyone think that pronouncements like these will help convince those who are ideologically opposed to vaccination or bought into the various nonsensical conspiracy theories about the nature, dangers, or efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, especially mRNA vaccines?

 Posted by at 5:50 pm

Fun with computer algebra

 Computer Algebra  No Responses »
Apr 202022
 

Came across a question tonight: How do you construct the matrix

$$\begin{pmatrix}1&2&…&n\\n&1&…&n-1\\…\\2&3&…&1\end{pmatrix}?$$

Here’s a bit of Maxima code to make it happen:

(%i1) M(n):=apply(matrix,makelist(makelist(mod(x-k+n,n)+1,x,0,n-1),k,0,n-1))$
(%i2) M(5);
                               [ 1  2  3  4  5 ]
                               [               ]
                               [ 5  1  2  3  4 ]
                               [               ]
(%o2)                          [ 4  5  1  2  3 ]
                               [               ]
                               [ 3  4  5  1  2 ]
                               [               ]
                               [ 2  3  4  5  1 ]

I also ended up wondering about the determinants of these matrices:

(%i3) makelist(determinant(M(i)),i,1,10);
(%o3) [1, - 3, 18, - 160, 1875, - 27216, 470596, - 9437184, 215233605, - 5500000000]

I became curious if this sequence of numbers was known, and indeed that is the case. It is sequence number A052182 in the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: “Determinant of n X n matrix whose rows are cyclic permutations of 1..n.” D’oh.

As it turns out, this sequence also has another name: it’s the Smarandache cyclic determinant sequence. In closed form, it is given by

$${\rm SCDNS}(n)=(-1)^{n+1}\frac{n+1}{2}n^{n-1}.$$

(%i4) SCDNS(n):=(-1)^(n+1)*(n+1)/2*n^(n-1);
                                      n + 1
                                 (- 1)      (n + 1)   n - 1
(%o4)               SCDNS(n) := (------------------) n
                                         2
(%i5) makelist(determinant(SCDNS(i)),i,1,10);
(%o5) [1, - 3, 18, - 160, 1875, - 27216, 470596, - 9437184, 215233605, - 5500000000]

Surprisingly, apart from the alternating sign it shares the first several values with another sequence, A212599. But then they deviate.

Don’t let anyone tell you that math is not fun.

 Posted by at 1:36 am

Maybe it’s 1904 all over again?

 History, Politics  No Responses »
Apr 142022
 

I’ve been finding parallels between the events in Ukraine and 1914 (when Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia), 1938 (when the Western world acquiesced to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in the hope that it would bring “peace for our times”, to use Chamberlain’s words), 1939 (Hitler’s attack on Poland) and 1943 (Hitler’s historic defeat at Stalingrad.)

But perhaps it’s 1904-1905, when the Russian Empire waged a naval war against the Japanese Empire.

The specifics are different (for starters, the Russo-Japanese war was started by Japan), but the similarities abound: The general expectation was that a major European power, Russia, will easily prevail over the perceived inferiority of an “Asiatic” empire. Instead, Russia was humiliated, and the political backlash directly led to the 1905 revolution, itself a precursor to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

And here we are, in 2022, with Russia humiliated again by an enemy that was widely perceived as inferior. Beyond the tactical defeats, the strategic, political blunders are palpable: threats of Russian aggression have not only breathed fresh life into the NATO alliance, but also prompted traditionally (and fiercely) neutral Sweden and Finland to take concrete steps towards NATO membership.

And now, the Moskva. I am not sure but I am beginning to think that this 12,500 ton guided missile cruiser is the largest warship sank by enemy action since WW2. I mean, if this does not reek criminal recklessness and incompetence on behalf of the Russian leadership, both political and military, I don’t know what does.

Does this mean that a revolution is in the works? Are Putin’s days numbered? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t bet on it. And the nuclear wildcard is… there. Perhaps Putin will resort to nukes if all other options fail. Or perhaps a palace revolution widens into civil war, and the world may yet witness the consequences of the first ever nuclear civil war. Whatever happens, I doubt it will be pretty.

 Posted by at 10:37 pm

Maxima 5.46

 Computer Algebra, Personal, Physics  No Responses »
Apr 132022
 

Acting as “release manager” for Maxima, the open-source computer algebra system, I am happy to announce that just minutes ago, I released version 5.46.

I am an avid Maxima user myself; I’ve used Maxima’s tensor algebra packages, in particular, extensively in the context of general relativity and modified gravity. I believe Maxima’s tensor algebra capabilities remain top notch, perhaps even unsurpassed. (What other CAS can derive Einstein’s field equations from the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian?)

The Maxima system has more than half a century of history: its roots go back to the 1960s, when I was still in kindergarten. I have been contributing to the project for nearly 20 years myself.

Anyhow, Maxima 5.46, here we go! I hope I made no blunders while preparing this release, but if I did, I’m sure I’ll hear about it shortly.

 Posted by at 2:26 am

The allure of illiberalism

 Hungary, Politics  No Responses »
Apr 102022
 

Last week, Hungary’s Orban won a resounding victory in Hungary’s elections.

I was not happy about it, to be honest, and many of my liberal-minded friends were bitterly disappointed.

But a few of them began to look more deeply into the reasons behind this outcome. A recent article* by my friend László Mérő, a Hungarian mathematician and publicist, was illuminating. László decided to volunteer in the elections process as a scrutineer. He ended up in a rural electoral district, where he had a chance to talk to many of the voters who cast their ballots, including both the roughly 30% who voted for the united opposition, but also the majority who chose Orban’s government instead.

His conclusion? There was no fraud. The process was conducted professionally, transparently, and cleanly. The government may dominate traditional media (indeed, this is one of the cardinal sins of Orban’s autocratic government) but the voters were not uninformed. They were aware of the opposition, its message, and its goals. They didn’t favor the government because they were brainwashed. They favored the ruling party because those candidates did a much better job on the ground. They were known to the voters, unlike the fly-by-night opposition.

And anyone who thinks Orban represents some fringe must think again. Just days after his resounding victory (he not only retained, he even increased his two thirds parliamentary supermajority) we were reminded by press releases that CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, was already set to hold its next meeting in Budapest. Orban will be the keynote speaker.

Wait, CPAC? The conference series held by one of the most respectable American conservative organizations, the American Conservative Union, dedicated to the foundations of conservatism, including personal liberty, freedom, and responsible governance?

That’s no fringe.

And, I strongly suspect, at least one of the reasons why Trump, Orban and other “illiberal” leaders and opinion-makers managed to hijack conservatism is that liberalism, in turn, was hijacked by the “woke” culture: a culture that is ready to “cancel” anyone who disagrees with whatever the canonical view of the day happens to be on race, gender, and related issues. I mean, J. K. Rowling? For real?

The fact that it all happens in a geopolitical context, allowing the likes of Putin to use his propaganda machine to try and divide the West even as his murderous horde of ill-equipped, badly led soldiers is rampaging in Ukraine, behaving like the worst of the Nazis (and prodded by Kremlin propaganda outlets to erase Ukrainian national identity) while pretending to “denazify” a country led by a Jewish president, is just the icing on this proverbial cake.

Elections are under way in France today. A possible Le Pen victory might have dramatic consequences.

*Magyar Nemzet, 2022.04.06 — In Hungarian

 Posted by at 1:20 pm

Churchill over Chamberlain

 Politics  No Responses »
Apr 052022
 

The news we get from liberated areas of Ukraine are getting grimmer every day.

Army general Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, America’s highest-ranking military officer, told us in his Congressional testimony today that “we are witness to the greatest threat to the peace and security of Europe and perhaps the world in my 42 years of service in uniform”.

I made up my mind. If we want to preserve at least a tiny chance of keeping this world both peaceful and decent, we must take the Churchillian step of openly and boldly confronting evil.

If I were in charge… I would make Ukraine unconditionally a full-fledged member of NATO, effective immediately, with all the protections of NATO’s Article 5 implied. I would at the same time announce that a large contingent of NATO troops are entering the country, in cooperation with Ukraine’s legitimate, elected government, to guarantee the country’s original (!) borders, yes, including Crimea and Donbass.

And let’s do this while the Russian military is led by the same nincompoops who thought that the most important item for an invading army to carry is dress uniforms, or that digging in the Red Forest, in the world’s most contaminated soil with radioactive fallout, is a smart idea.

Mr. Putin, then, it’s your move. You push your button, we push ours, and the world as we know it ends. But I am betting that you are, in the end, just a worthless coward. Waste of skin.

 Posted by at 1:06 pm
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