The Center for Performative Preening

We used to have a fairly impressive Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, which has now been neutered by the Orange Man, who began the process by adding his own name and an extra The to the Kennedy Center's facade. That was comical enough, but to punish Orange Man for his preening, the performing artists then began to preen themselves. A run of "Hamilton"? Canceled. The world premiere of Philip Glass's Lincoln Symphony? Canceled. A season of the Washington National Opera? Canceled. Martha Graham Dance Company? Canceled. Amd so it went, as one company after another tried to punish Orange Man by punishing Washington's art lovers.

And Orange Man responded as only he would do, by closing the Kennedy Center for two years effective July 4, the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. Take that, everyone.

It's cold and dark in Kyiv

While Putin and Trump play their ceasefire games, Russia's dictator continues to rain drones and missiles on Ukraine and its capital, Kyiv, where the 7 a.m. temperature this morning showed 2 deg Fahrenheit -- 17 below zero Celius. It's now morning here in New Hampshire, where I'm enjoying a bit warmer climate of 6 above (minus 15 Celsius). This has been a brutal, oldfashioned winter in the US Northeast, with a foot and a half of snow on the ground and weeks going by without the thermometer climbing above freezing.

Last night saw 85 Russian drones launched against Ukraine, with 64 intercepted by antiaircraft defenses. The barrage killed five civilians and wounded nineteen, with the worst damage -- as usual this winter -- inflicted on the embattled country's power plants. Tens of thousands of households in Kyiv are without heat or light today, and the temperature won't climb above freezing there, either, not today and not in the week ahead.

Inflation by the ounce

On the day I was born -- November 2, 1931 -- my father could have bought an ounce of gold for $21. (Dad didn't have $21 to spare, of course. He was the typical American laborer, earning 35 cents an hour for a 60-hour week.) On the Dollar Times website, I see that inflation over my lifetime has averaged 3.21%, meaning that a 1931 dollar today equates to $20.13. That bit of gold should be worth $423!

In fact, gold passed $5,300 an ounce the other day. That's what the smart money thinks it's worth, since gold's value, unlike the dollar's, ought to keep increasing as the years go by.

[Feb. 1: Okay, well, gold has since lost $400 or so. I won't hazard a guess as to whether that's a reason to buy or sell....]

The least-remembered "Day"

This is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and of the half-dozen newspapers and magazines I check every morning, only Commentary bothered to remember it. There, Seth Mandel argued that today's antisemites are doing their best to erase the Holocaust from our memory by replacing it with "genocide".

A primer: the word "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew teaching at Duke, a haven he reached after fleeing Warsaw in September 1939 as Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them. His great interest during the war years was what he then termed the crime of "barbarity," from the Roman persecution of Christians (he'd read Quo Vadis as a boy), through the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915, to the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. The last led in 1944 as Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the first time "genocide" was defined in print.

Lemkin became an adviser to Justice Robert Jackson in the postwar Nuremberg Trials. In the 1950s, at his urging, the UN formally recognized genocide as a crime, and he helped Arab lawyers build a case against the 19th century French genocide in Algeria. Of interest today, as Vladimir Putin tries to extinguish Ukraine, Lemkin also argued that Stalin's mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants -- the Holdomor of 1933-34 -- constituted a genocide.

Yes, capitalism works!

On Monday, Trump was ready to seize Greenland by military force. Our unpronouncable Pituffik Space Base has 150 Americans in residence, so we already outnumber the troops recently deployed by Denmark and other NATO countries. But our Space Force isn't trained for combat, so the occupation would certainly require the real US Army.

As a result, on Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrial average shed 871 points, the US dollar weakened, the Swiss franc strengthened, and gold soared to $4,760 an ounce.

And on Wednesday, Trump chickened out. Oh, never mind; there'll be no invasion, after all!

Among my morning reading is National Review, the conservative magazine Bill Buckley founded in 1951. It has offered a Modest Proposal to end the fuss. United Airlines now has nonstop flights from Newark to Nuuk each summer, so why don't 60,000 Americans move there, acquire citizenship, and vote to become a US territory?

Trump has lost it

I live in a college town, so I'm surrounded by people with Trump Derangement Syndrome. And oh, what gifts the President is giving them! He favors despotic Russia over the imperiled democracy of Ukraine; he announces a red line in Iran and promptly chickens out; and now he threatens war against NATO if Denmark won't give him Greenland, whose Thyng or parliament legislated for more years (roughly 950-1350) than the US Congress has sat in Washington.

Brilliant. And who wins from all this? Well, Vladimir Putin, of course, and the ayatollahs in Tedran. And behind them: the smirking Xi Jinping, sewing up trade agreements in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and announcing that China is a "near-Arctic" power with navigation rights across the northern frontiers of Russia, Greenland, Canada, and the US.

Trump began his insulting letter to the Norwegian prime minister with the salutation "Dear Jonas" and signed off as "President DJT". (Why send it to Norway instead of Denmark? The very first sentence explains: "Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize....") Somebody must rein him in, and it won't be our Vice-President, who if anything thinks less of Europe than his boss. That leaves the Secretary of State. Marco Rubio? Past time for you to speak up!

An American fighting for Ukraine

Putin's atrocities in Ukraine are nearing their fifth year, and already have lasted longer than Stalin's "Great Patriotic War" against Nazi Germany. Early on, idealistic and adventure-seeking foreigners volunteered for the Ukrainian Army, in numbers sufficient to form them into a Foreign Legion of their own. Many have since gone home, but the Kyiv Independent today has the story of an American code-named (and perhaps actually named) Ryan. He signed up in March 2022, took off a year to visit his family in the Pacific Northwest, and now had returned to the fight. Read his plea, and take the opportunity to subscribe to the newspaper that for nearly four years has been the first thing I read every morning.

So long, Mr Maduro, and good riddance

Appaently the former president of Venezuela is incarcerated in an American warship en route to the United States on charges of drug smuggling and playing about with weapons. No US troops were killed in the hoist, which Donald Trump in his trademark humility termed "a brilliant operation, actually." (There were injuried aboard an American helicopter hit by defensive fire.) A good job, and congratulations to the Seals or Green Berets or Delta Force commandos who went into Caracas and did the job. Oh, and also the CIA officers on site who fingered Maduro's location.