She anchored sports Fox News 11 Los Angeles for some time, but recently departed for the Newhouse School (of Journalism) at Syracuse University.
On Twitter.
Friday, September 16, 2022
Why Ukraine Will Win
From Frances Fukuyama, at the Journal of Democracy, "The country’s military is advancing on the battlefield. If Ukraine defeats Russia’s massive army, the ripple effects will be felt across the globe":
The war in Ukraine, now in its seventh month, marks a critical juncture that will determine the course of global democracy. There are three important points to be made about its significance. First is the question of why the war occurred in the first place. The argument was made, even before the Russian invasion, that Vladimir Putin was being driven by fear of NATO expansion and was seeking a neutral buffer to protect his country. While Putin doubtless disliked the idea that Ukraine could enter NATO, this was not his real motive. Ukrainian membership was never imminent. NATO expansion was not a plot hatched in Washington, London, or Paris to drive the alliance as far east as possible. It was driven by the former satellites of the former USSR, which had been dominated by that country since 1945 and were convinced that Russia would try to do so again once the balance of power turned to Russia’s favor. Putin, moreover, has explained very clearly what was at stake. In a long article written in 2021 and in a speech on the eve of the invasion, he castigated the breakup of the Soviet Union and asserted that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” artificially separated. More broadly, Russian demands in the leadup to the war made it very clear that Moscow objected to the entire post-1991 European settlement that created a “Europe whole and free.” Russian war aims would not be satisfied by a neutral Ukraine; that neutrality would have to extend across Europe. The real threat perceived by Putin was in the end not to the security of Russia, but to its political model. He has asserted that liberal democracy didn’t work generally, but was particularly inappropriate in the Slavic world. A free Ukraine belied that assertion, and for that reason had to be eliminated. The second critical point concerns Western solidarity in support of Ukraine. Up to now, the continuing supply of weapons and economic sanctions have been absolutely critical to Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian power. Most observers have in fact been surprised by the degree of solidarity shown by NATO, and particularly by the turnaround in German foreign policy. However, the Russians have now cut off a large part of the gas they supply to Europe in retaliation for Western sanctions, and there are huge uncertainties as to whether foreign support will continue as the weather gets colder and energy prices continue to rise all over Europe. In this respect, the most critical variable to watch is the outcome of the current military conflict. Political analysts typically believe that military outcomes reflect underlying political forces, but in Ukraine today the opposite is true: The country’s political future will depend first and foremost on its battlefield success in the short run. Over the summer, when Russia had withdrawn from its initial effort to occupy Kyiv and the fighting was centered in the Donbas, a conventional wisdom emerged that Ukraine and Russia were locked in a “long war” (featured on the cover of the Economist). Many asserted it was inevitable that there would be a stalemate and war of attrition that might go on for years. As Ukraine’s forward military momentum slowed, there were Western voices arguing that peace negotiations and territorial concessions from Ukraine were necessary. Had this advice been followed, it would have led to a terrible outcome: Russia keeping the parts of Ukraine it had swallowed, leaving a rump country unable to ship exports out of its southern ports. Such a negotiation would not bring peace; Russia would simply wait until it had reconstituted its military to restart the war. By contrast, if Ukraine can regain military momentum before the end of 2022, it will be much easier for leaders of Western democracies to argue that their people should tighten their belts over the coming winter. For that reason, military progress in the short term is critical for the Western coalition to hold together. The prospect that Ukraine can actually regain military momentum is entirely possible; indeed, it is likely in my view and unfolding as we speak. The Ukrainian general staff has been extremely smart in its overall strategy, focusing not on the Donbas but on liberating parts of the south that were occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the war. Ukrainian forces have used NATO-supplied weapons, particularly the HIMARS long-range rocket system, to attack ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics hubs all along the front. They have succeeded in attacking supposedly secure Russian rear areas deep in the Crimean peninsula. At the moment, 25,000 to 30,000 Russian troops are trapped in a pocket around the southern city of Kherson, which lies on the west bank of the Dnipro River. The Ukrainians have succeeded in taking out the bridges connecting Kherson to Russia, and have been slowly tightening the noose around these forces. It is possible that the Russian position there will collapse catastrophically and that Moscow will lose a good part of its remaining army. More broadly, morale on the Ukrainian side has been immensely higher than on the Russian side. Ukrainians are fighting for their own land, and have seen the atrocities committed by Russian forces in areas the latter have already occupied. The Russian military, by contrast, has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to replace the manpower it has already lost, recruiting prison convicts and people from the poorer ethnic minorities to do the fighting that ethnic Russians seem unwilling to do themselves. Thirdly, a Russian military failure—meaning at minimum the liberation of territories conquered after 24 February 2022—will have enormous political reverberations around the world...
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
Monday, September 12, 2022
America Surrenders to Woke Plague
Here's VDH, at American Greatness, "America Delira":
We went mad because we easily could. And we could, not because we were poor and oppressed, but because we were rich and bored. Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. It is not boilerplate anti-Americanism of the usual cheap Euro style. And their keen criticism is not just that we are $30 trillion in debt, dependent on China, with a corrupt elite, or have gone insane inventing the most lurid crimes to put away the supposedly predetermined guilty Donald Trump. Instead, they express disbelief, worry, lamentation even, that the one solid referent in the world has gone, well, completely rabid. They are terrified after the Afghanistan debacle that their old ally or new homeland, the once constant America, is delirious, incompetent, and self-loathing, and now there is no plausible alternative to the old American deterrence. So, they wonder who will resist China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—and are silently petrified to go it alone without the United States. They seem staggered by the very ideas that now emanate from the United States: that nonexistent borders are desirable; that once rarified institutions like the FBI or CIA now function like the Stasi of old; that the very idea of meritocracy is considered racist; that one incorrect word can destroy a life-long career; that there are three or more sexes, not two; that biological men with male genitalia and physiology can compete, and destroy decades of advances, in women’s sports; that race is the sole mode of self-identification; and that half of America dislikes American customs, history—and the other 50 percent of the population—as much as do its enemies. Onlookers no longer see American universities as free-wheeling bastions of unfettered research and expression. Rather they watch dreary (and sometimes scary) places where conformity to the old Soviet-style is enforced—or else. There is an apprehension that Russian hypersonic missiles are superior to America’s, that China could easily sink the Pacific fleet if it got too close to a blockade of Taiwan, that America is now reconciled to a nuclear Iranian theocracy, that North Korea will try something stupid soon—and that the American military is now somehow different, somehow less lethal. Dogma and Stalinist-like orthodoxy now plague our films, our fiction, our research, and even our scientific inquiry. Public policy discussion of real problems like long COVID can be as much about what race is affected the worst by it—and thus which diabolical actor or demographic is to blame—rather than a Marshall Plan rush to find a cure for everyone. A discussion of Homer’s Odyssey in college is likely to be a Sovietized melodrama of rooting out the sexists and racists in the preliterate bard’s cosmos, rather than why and how such an epic has enthralled audiences for over 2,700 years. The subtext is that we are growing poorer, weaker, and more ridiculous—an acceptable price if we can at least prove we are woke. So, what made America unhinged? The Woke Plague Wokeness is a large part of it. Properly understood, wokeness is simply the doctrine that all perceived inequality must be the result of culpability, not personal behavior or conduct. There is no role for chance, individual health, inheritance, or character that make us different. There are no cosmic forces like globalization that transcend race. What’s left instead is a nefariousness that divides the world into a collective binary of the noble victimized and their demonic oppressors. Thus, the duty of government and righteous egalitarian culture is to divide the country, in post-Marxist style, to identify the victims/oppressed, and to redistribute power, money, and influence to them. That allows the anointed to condemn the victimizers/oppressors collectively and to stigmatize, ostracize, and enfeeble them. Every agency available—government, popular culture, science, history, literature, the arts, the university, the media, big tech, the corporate boardroom, and Wall Street—must be subordinated and recalibrated to spot supposed inequality so that they can fix it through reparatory discrimination. All being equal and poorer is preferable to all being richer, but with some richer than others. Sometimes the effort manifests in reparatory commercials where 40 to 50 percent of the actors are black. Is that corporate America’s way of helping stop the carnage in Chicago—from a safe distance? Sometimes the effort is media-based and designed to ignore self-confessed racial motives in violent crime when the black perpetrators deliberately target white or Asian victims. And sometimes, there is a general exclusionary rule that media grandees can openly generalize and stereotype all whites as toxic—in language that would earn their firings if applied to any other groups. Is the theory that a white assembly-line worker without a college degree born in 1990 properly owes society for the purported sins of the long dead? Wokeness is also, at its most basic, a selfish creed. We still gladly use the very institutions and infrastructure we inherited from our ancestors—from Stanford University to the Hoover Dam—and then damn them as inferior to our standards. Left unsaid is that our generation can neither create a new major research university nor build a monumental dam. The wealthiest and most deductively biased among us are the most likely to project their hatreds onto the middle classes that lack their prejudices. Generally, the immigrant poor and dispossessed who enter America know why they came and thus see it as their salvation. In contrast, the more elite and blessed the immigrants who thrive in America, the more likely they are to chomp the hand that fed them. Woke must destroy its critics. And who are they? The age-old individualist. The traditional outspoken. The familiar maverick. The unbeliever. The apostate. Anyone who believes woke is really a familiar and ancient evil with a mere 21st-century face, our version of the Inquisition but supposedly redirected to noble justice, cruel Jacobinism now masked in enlightened racial clothes, or toxic Bolshevism with an iPhone. Can you have wokeism without Twitter and Facebook, a cancel culture, censors, and an array of punishments? No more than you could have the witch trials without Reverend Samuel Parris’ mass hysteria, or the Reign of Terror without Robespierre and the guillotine of his “Committee of the Public Safety,” or the purges without Stalin and Beria, or the loyalty oaths without Joe McCarthy. So, cancel culture itself is always dangerous and led by rank opportunists and careerists disguised as social justice warriors—as we know from ancient scapegoating, ostracism, exile, and modern Trotskization. The Cowards and Bullies of Cyberspace But the rise of the internet and social media empowered Orwellian cancellation in two dangerous ways. One was instantaneous accusation, verdict, and punishment accomplished online in a nanosecond. Up popped the Covington High School kids standing face-to-face with the pathological liar and phony activist Nathan Phillips. A millisecond later, the Twitter lynch mob judged the teenagers—white, male, with MAGA hats, and unafraid—as victimizers and the provocateur Phillips—the noble Native American—a victim. And that was that. The lives of the former were nearly ruined, the latter sanctified—all without any desire for facts, context, or the truth. The faker Jussie Smollett spun a preposterous lie about being attacked by the usual white cyclopses and hydras (again, with the de rigueur MAGA hats). Smollett spun “facts” that only proved he was a racist and an inveterate liar. And then we were off to the races. Everyone from Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi rushed to post first their condolences and outrage, in order to deify the faker Smollett and to demonize “them”—that is, the nonexistent “MAGA” assaulters. Lunatic condemnations arrived at electronic speed. Apologies for being a patsy, fool, a bully, and a racist never materialized. We had learned nothing from the Duke Lacrosse hoax and so that is why we trump it now with the Duke volleyball ruse. The point in America now is not the truth, much less justice—but career and agenda-driven revenge for not quite getting the attention, the influence and the bounty that others are perceived to enjoy. One second a news flash blared that the FBI was at Mar-a-Lago. The next moment, “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss was out of his Twitter cave, comparing Trump to the guilty Rosenbergs who were executed in the 1950s for espionage. And a breath later, former CIA director Michael Hayden, chained to his keyboard, had tweeted his approval of an envisioned judge, jury, executioner sentence for the now guilty traitor Trump. Then a day or two storing or selling “nuclear secrets” went the way of “I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . names.” Anonymity of the cyberworld, of course, adds to the dramatic lynchings. The cowardly posters dream up silly pictures and fake names as their IDs. And then post hourly, assured that if they lie, they smear, they fabricate there are never consequences. The Twitter or Facebook bully is not like someone known, in person or in print, defaming openly. A Samuel Johnson definition of social media might be “instant character assassination of the innocent by the anonymous without consequences.”
Our Elites Desperately Want Us to Hate Our Fellow Americans, We Absolutely Have to Resist
Here's Batya Ungar-Sargon, for the Hill:
Jonathan Lemire, The Big Lie
From Jonathan Lemire, at Amazon, The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020.
Ukraine Takes Its Counteroffensive All the Way to the Russian Border
This is very big news. Now folks are worried that Ukraine might win the war.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Ukraine says it has liberated one village after another in the northeast as it pushes a counteroffensive whose success has surprised many":
KHARKIV, Ukraine — Ukraine claimed Monday that it took several more villages, pushing Russian forces right back to the northeastern border, part of a lightning counteroffensive that forced Moscow to withdraw troops from some areas in recent days. After months of little discernible movement on the battlefield, Kyiv’s sudden momentum has lifted Ukrainian morale and provoked outrage in Russia and even some rare public criticism of President Vladimir Putin’s war. As Ukrainian flags began to flutter over one city emerging from Russian occupation, a local leader alleged that the Kremlin’s troops had committed atrocities against civilians there similar to those in other places seized by Moscow’s forces. “In some areas of the front, our defenders reached the state border with the Russian Federation,” said Oleh Sinegubov, the governor of the northeastern Kharkiv region. Over the weekend, the Russian Defense Ministry said troops would be pulled from two areas in that region to regroup in the eastern region of Donetsk. There were reports of chaos as Russian troops pulled out in haste. “The Russians were here in the morning. Then at noon, they suddenly started shouting wildly and began to run away, charging off in tanks and armored vehicles,” Dmytro Hrushchenko, a resident of recently liberated Zaliznychne, a small town near the eastern front, told Sky News of the quick withdrawal. It was not yet clear if Ukraine’s latest blitz could signal a turning point in the war. Some analysts suggested it might be, while also cautioning that there would likely be months more of fighting. Momentum has switched back and forth before. Still, the mood was jubilant across Ukraine. The General Staff of the Armed Forces said Monday that its troops had liberated more than 20 settlements within the last day. In Kharkiv, authorities hailed some return to normality, noting that power and water had been restored to about 80% of the region’s population following Russian attacks on infrastructure that knocked out electricity in many places across Ukraine. “You are heroes!!!” Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov wrote early in the morning on the Telegram messaging app, referring to those restoring utilities. “Thanks to everyone who did everything possible on this most difficult night for Kharkiv to normalize the life of the city as soon as possible.” The buoyant mood was also captured by a defiant President Volodymyr Zelensky on social media late Sunday. “Do you still think you can intimidate, break us, force us to make concessions?” Zelensky said. “Read my lips. Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst for us are not as scary and deadly as your ‘friendship’ and brotherhood.’” At the end, he exclaimed: “We will be with gas, lights, water and food… and WITHOUT you!” In Russia itself, there were some signs of disarray as Russian military bloggers and patriotic commentators chastised the Kremlin for failing to mobilize more forces and take stronger action against Ukraine. Russia has continuously stopped short of calling its invasion of Ukraine a war, instead using the description “special military operation.” Instead of a mass mobilization that could spur civil discontent and protest, it has relied on a limited contingent of volunteers. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed leader of the Russian region of Chechnya, publicly criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for what he called “mistakes” that had made the Ukrainian blitz possible. Even more notable, such criticism seeped onto state-controlled Russian TV. “People who convinced President Putin that the operation will be fast and effective ... these people really set up all of us,” Boris Nadezhdin, a former parliament member, said on a talk show on NTV television. “We’re now at the point where we have to understand that it’s absolutely impossible to defeat Ukraine using these resources and colonial war methods.” Yet amid Ukraine’s ebullience, the casualties kept mounting. Zelensky’s office said Monday that at least four civilians were killed and 11 others were wounded in a series of Russian attacks in nine regions of the country. The United Nations Human Rights Office said last week that 5,767 civilians have been killed so far. In a reminder of the war’s toll, a council member in Izyum — one of the areas that Moscow said it has withdrawn troops from — accused Russian forces of killing civilians and committing other atrocities...
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Californians Survive the Heatwave --- Barely
I was beginning to wonder when it was going to cool down. Phew, that was one hella heatwave. And Californians dodged a bullet, it turns out.
This article's from last week.
At the Los Angeles Times, "California averts widespread rolling blackouts as energy demands ease amid heat wave":
For nearly three hours Tuesday night, California officials warned of imminent rolling blackouts as the state’s electrical grid struggled to keep up with surging demand during a punishing heat wave. The Golden State avoided widespread outages, though three Northern California cities experienced brief losses of power. At 8 p.m., the California Independent System Operator downgraded its level 3 alert, the final step before calling for rolling blackouts, saying that “consumer conservation played a big part in protecting electric grid reliability.” There were “no load sheds for the night,” the grid operator said; however, Alameda, Palo Alto and Healdsburg officials said they implemented short “rotating outages.” In Alameda, municipal utility officials said at 6:20 p.m. that rotating outages were beginning. Power would be shut off to two circuits for one hour, according to Alameda Municipal Power. Just before 7:30 p.m., utility officials in the Bay Area city said the second hour of power interruptions had been called off. “No more rotating outages for tonight,” the utility said in a tweet. “Crews are working to get power restored to all customers shut off in the initial hour of outages.” City officials in Healdsburg confirmed outages around 6:30 p.m. “As directed by CAISO, rolling power outages to begin,” according to a Facebook post by the Sonoma County city. Outages lasting about an hour per zone would cycle through each block until the energy shortage is over, the city officials said. “Due to lower system loads, the need for rotating outages has ended,” city officials said at 8:10 p.m. Palo Alto officials said around 7 p.m. that they had been cleared to restore power to about 1,700 customers after outages to meet Cal ISO’s “load-shedding requirements.” “We did not order rotating outages,” Anne Gonzales, an ISO spokesperson, said in an email to The Times on Tuesday night. “We held at [Energy Emergency Alert] 3 with no load shed, and [the alert] ended at 8 p.m.” Gonzales did not respond to several requests for clarification by phone. Shortly after 7 p.m., Cal ISO noted that peak grid demand had hit 52,061 megawatts, “a new all-time record.” The alert did not affect Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers, as the utility operates its own grid and is separate from Cal ISO. “We’re not suspecting any blackouts due to energy shortages and are not a part of any rolling blackouts [Cal ISO] has planned,” said Mia Rose Wong, a spokesperson for the municipal utility. The DWP forecast Tuesday’s demand to be elevated but not enough to surpass available electrical generation and reserve capacity, Wong said. Nevertheless, the utility advised its customers to conserve power and follow the state grid regulator’s guidance, including setting thermostats to at least 78 degrees and not using large appliances. In addition to urging its customers to reduce energy use, the DWP makes excess power available to Cal ISO when available, Wong said, though it was not clear whether there was any excess power Tuesday night. The heat wave is now expected to last through Friday, but the worst of it could be over for the southern half of the state — even as temperatures remain dangerously high. For much of Northern California, the heat was expected to peak Tuesday, but temperatures are predicted to remain well above average through the week, according to the National Weather Service. By late Tuesday afternoon, the weather service confirmed that downtown Sacramento had set an all-time temperature record. A preliminary high of 115 degrees broke the previous record of 114 set on July 17, 1925, meteorologists said. About an hour later, officials reported that the temperature had topped out at 116. The state capital has seen a barrage of extremes over the last year, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and California climate fellow at the Nature Conservancy, said in a tweet Tuesday evening. “First its longest dry spell on record, which ended with wettest day on record, followed by driest start to a calendar year on record, now followed by its hottest day on record,” Swain wrote. In Hanford, the weather service office stated that as of 3 p.m., “all major weather reporting airports in the San Joaquin Valley have set daily record temperatures.” Four cities in the Bay Area broke maximum temperature records tallied on any day of the year, according to the weather service. San Jose’s temperature of 109 Tuesday beat the previous all-time high of 108, set Sept. 1, 2017. Santa Rosa’s high of 115 broke the high of 113 set in 1913; Napa’s 114 broke the record of 113 set in 1961; and King City in Monterey County hit 116, breaking the record of 115 set in 2017. Redwood City in San Mateo County hit 110, tying the record set in 1972...
Policies Pushing Electric Vehicles Show Why Few People Want One
From Bjorn Lomborg, at the Wall Street Journal, "They wouldn’t need huge subsidies to sell if they really were a good choice, and consumers know that":
We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones? In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one. The climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime. The minerals required for those batteries also present an ethical problem, as many are mined in areas with dismal human-rights records. Most cobalt, for instance, is dug out in Congo, where child labor is not uncommon, specifically in mining. There are security risks too, given that mineral processing is concentrated in China. Increased demand for already-prized minerals is likely to drive up the price of electric cars significantly. The International Energy Agency projects that if electric cars became as prevalent as they would have to be for the world to reach net zero by 2050, the annual total demand for lithium for automobile batteries alone that year would be almost 28 times as much as current annual global lithium production. The material prices for batteries this year are more than three times what they were in 2021, and electricity isn’t getting cheaper either. Even if rising costs weren’t an issue, electric cars wouldn’t be much of a bargain. Proponents argue that though they’re more expensive to purchase, electric cars are cheaper to drive. But a new report from a U.S. Energy Department laboratory found that even in 2025 the agency’s default electric car’s total lifetime cost will be 9% higher than a gasoline car’s, and the study relied on the very generous assumption that electric cars are driven as much as regular ones. In reality, electric cars are driven less than half as much, which means they’re much costlier per mile.... Electric vehicles will take over the market only if innovation makes them actually better and cheaper than gasoline-powered cars. Politicians are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and keeping consumers from the cars they want for virtually no climate benefit.
Don't Try This at Home
Unbelievably wild.
And it's a Hoonigan.
WoW so good! 👌 pic.twitter.com/wRtQGGOqn3
— Figen (@_TheFigen) September 10, 2022
Saturday, September 10, 2022
King Charles III Formally Proclaimed U.K. Monarch With Pomp and Ceremony (VIDEO)
At the Wall Street Journal, "Ancient ceremony was first to be televised, draw together all living former prime ministers":
LONDON—King Charles III was officially proclaimed monarch during a historic televised Accession Council ceremony on Saturday, as Britain’s new king undertook the first formalities of his reign while still grieving for his late mother. For the first time, live television images were beamed from the throne room in St. James’s Palace as King Charles oversaw his first Privy Council meeting. For nearly all Britons, it was the first time they had seen the ceremony, giving them a glimpse at time-honored rituals that have ushered in kings and queens over the centuries. LONDON—King Charles III was officially proclaimed monarch during a historic televised Accession Council ceremony on Saturday, as Britain’s new king undertook the first formalities of his reign while still grieving for his late mother. For the first time, live television images were beamed from the throne room in St. James’s Palace as King Charles oversaw his first Privy Council meeting. For nearly all Britons, it was the first time they had seen the ceremony, giving them a glimpse at time-honored rituals that have ushered in kings and queens over the centuries. The last time the accession ceremony took place was when Queen Elizabeth II acceded the throne in 1952, before televisions were common. The last prime minister to witness such a ceremony was Winston Churchill. Large crowds gathered around the palace, first built by King Henry VIII, to catch a glimpse of history in the making. Charles became king the moment his 96-year-old mother died so the proclamation of his role as monarch is now a largely ceremonial process. Historically, however, it was a way of formally announcing the new monarch to the nation before the era of mass media. “It is my most sorrowful duty to announce the death of my beloved mother, the Queen,” said King Charles, dressed in tails and standing before a red-velvet throne inscribed with the late Queen Elizabeth’s insignia “ER.” “My mother’s reign was unequaled,” he said. “I shall strive to follow the inspiring example I have been set.” More than a hundred privy councilors, including all living former prime ministers, watched on as King Charles signed an oath to guarantee the security of the Church of Scotland and declared the day of his mother’s funeral a national holiday. He was also flanked by his son and heir apparent, William, now the Prince of Wales. The Privy Council advises the monarch and is mainly made up of current and former British politicians. Later in the day, the king’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, emerged together with their wives outside Windsor Castle to view a sea of flowers placed at the castle gates, and then greeted and chatted with well-wishers. It was a moment of unity after years of tension sparked by Harry’s and his wife’s, actor Megan Markle, decision to quit royal duties in 2020 to build a new life in the U.S. Prince Harry has a tell-all book about his life as a royal coming out soon. That, combined with allegations by the Duchess of Sussex of racism in royal ranks, has strained relations between the two brothers, officials say. All four, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, spent more than half an hour meeting visitors, shaking hands, accepting condolences and occasionally smiling. Prince William issued his first statement since the death of his grandmother, praising her life of service. The prince, now the heir apparent to the throne, said that while he had lost a grandmother, he felt grateful he and his family got to spend so much time with her. “She was by my side at my happiest moments. And she was by my side during the saddest days of my life. I knew this day would come, but it will be some time before the reality of life without Grannie will truly feel real,” he said. An Accession Council is usually called within 24 hours of the death of a British monarch and is customarily held at St. James’s Palace, which was the residence to British monarchs for 300 years up until Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. After the Privy Council meeting, the state trumpeters of the household cavalry gathered on the balcony of the redbrick palace to herald the new monarch. Then the Garter King of Arms announced the new monarch to the waiting crowds “with one voice and consent of tongue.” “God save the king!” shouted the crowd in unison in response to the proclamation, before singing the national anthem. “Three cheers for his majesty the king!” said the Garter King of Arms, to which the King’s Guard soldiers took off their bearskin hats and replied, “Hip, hip, hurrah!” The announcement was followed by a flurry of proclamations across the country, including in the city of London, and gun salutes at the Tower of London and Hyde Park. Senior government ministers will gather in parliament to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king. At noon, Britons clogged into the streets around the historic Royal Exchange building in the center of London’s financial district, holding phones in the air to capture the pomp and pageantry. A procession of guards clutching weapons of centuries past—pikemen, musketeers, and the royal guards, wearing the classic red uniforms and tall bearskin caps—preceded a reading of the proclamation that declared Charles the new king. Debbie Harris and her daughter Lucy, 14, traveled in from Essex with a pair of friends. They planned to head over to Buckingham Palace, where they would lay a bouquet of flowers for the queen. “I thought it’d be nice for her to come down to experience it,” she said. Ms. Harris showed off a photo that hangs on her wall at home—her with her arm around a wax replica of the queen at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. “My father used to always buy the commemorative mugs and plates and everything as a family,” she said. Later in the afternoon, the king met with Prime Minister Liz Truss and her cabinet, as well as leaders of the opposition political parties. Televised footage of those meetings were to be made public too, in a further sign of the king’s desire to make this process of transition accessible. With the king now formally installed, the focus will turn to the burial of Queen Elizabeth. The queen’s coffin will in the coming days depart her Scottish residence in Balmoral where she died to the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh—the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland. The queen’s body will then go to St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, where the queen will lie at rest, allowing the public to view her coffin. From there it will be flown to London, where the coffin again will be put on display for the public to view before a state funeral at Westminster Abbey. She will be buried next to her late husband, Prince Philip, at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle...
Friday, September 9, 2022
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