In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

What struck me about her husband Paul's DUI arrest over the weekend was the episode in the 2020 election campaign where pro-Trump pranksters put up a slowed version of one of her appearances that made her sound drunk. The response of the fact checkers was to say the speaker doesn't drink : We requested an interview with Pelosi for this story. Her office declined, but spokesman Drew Hammill told us in an email that the speaker doesn’t drink. (Pelosi’s office told us she doesn’t drink for a similar fact-check in 2010.) That lines up with what others have said about Pelosi over the years. After a manipulated video of the speaker slurring her words went viral on social media in May 2019, her daughter, Christine Pelosi, tweeted a rebuttal. “Republicans and their conservative allies have been pumping this despicable fake meme for years! Now they are caught,” she said. “#FactCheck: Madam Speaker doesn’t even drink alcohol!” At the time, my reaction was, "The Pelosis own ...

I've mentioned here already that by far the best coverage of the Russo-Ukraine war is at the leftist Daily Kos, and that's a puzzle, because the left as we used to understand it, even well after the death of Stalin, was always inclined to idealize the Soviet Union. Go no farther than the leftist Sen Sanders, about whom there is dispute whether a 1988 trip there with his new wife following their wedding was a honeymoon, though the trip definitely did occur. A little over a generation later, it seems like the left is taking the lead in opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, even at the price of endorsing Reagan-era neoconservative policy, and in fact neoconservatives like Eliot Cohen and Frederick Kagan are being rehabilitated. For now, I just don't have an explanation, except to note that this is taking place. But let's look at the analysis in today's update from the Daily Kos : The U.S. is sending its heavy vehicles by ship . There’s 200 of these on t...

I can't avoid thinking that perhaps over the past year, the US Bishops came proactively to an agreement-to-disagree on how to handle the issue of barring Catholic politicians from communion if they advocate abortion -- I can't help but wonder if Abp Cordileone was implicitly referring to such a thing in this passage from his interview with America magazine : I suppose there will be a variety of opinions, but I think as bishops, we respect each other’s decisions and matters like this. Each bishop has to decide in accordance with his conscience in these and other types of situations as well. And they’re usually very complex. There are a number of different values and priorities to weigh in taking an action or not taking an action. What good will it do? What evil will it avoid? What might be the side effects? All these things have to be weighed, and we can come to different prudential judgments, using our conscience. I note that while a number of conservative bishops have...

According to Politico, Not even a week into press secretary KARINE JEAN-PIERRE’s time at the lectern, the White House brought in her Pentagon counterpart JOHN KIRBY, a runner-up for the podium, for a communications role. . . . For about 24 hours, no one at the White House could answer whether Kirby would be working at the National Security Council or the press office and how often he would be appearing at the podium, if at all. Several White House officials and insiders told West Wing Playbook that they felt the move put a damper on Jean-Pierre’s first week, and undercut her credibility at a moment when conservative media has targeted her. Indeed, according to Red State, Suddenly, we started hearing reports about a new shake-up in the Communications department at the White House — that John Kirby, the Pentagon spox, who had been considered for the Press Secretary job was going to be brought in, in a communications role, and saying that he would be doing some briefings. ...

Other than rants from figures like AOC and Whoopi Goldberg , reaction to Abp Cordileone's banning of Speaker Pelosi from communion has been largely muted and predictable. As of yesterday , "Pelosi's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request to comment." However, according to the Red State agggregator-blog, The California Democrat attended mass on Sunday at Holy Trinity in Georgetown where she received Holy Communion, Politico Playbook reported. Pool reports show that President Joe Biden often attends evening masses at the parish as well. It also cited this tweet, apparently sent to the press in error: WOW. Washington Archdiocese accidentally sent this email to @dcexaminer admitting that it is ignoring press inquiries about whether @WashArchbishop will "bring down the hammer on Pelosi." pic.twitter.com/KPtY6gpZzu — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 23, 2022 Basically, nothing has changed. Catholic politicians like Sen...

The map above shows the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth as of 1619, overlaid on present European borders. It covered much of Ukraine, as well as the Baltics and Belarus. Two weeks ago, I posted on the likely outcome for Poland under conditions resulting from a militarily weakened Russia in the region and suggested Poland might be aiming for some type of return to the Commonwealth. Deveopments since then make this seem more and more likely. Yesterday, Polish President Andrzej Duda addressed the Ukrainian parliament, and he and President Zelensky appeared ready to establish closer ties between the countries: "We have agreed to implement this in the near future in a respective bilateral agreement. First [the agreement] on joint border and customs control, and later [the agreement] on a single conditional border - when Ukraine becomes a member of the European Union," Zelensky said. He expressed confidence that all the necessary decisions will be made first for Ukrain...

I'm heading this post with another fanciful end-state map for a theoretical partition of Russia, this one after a putative 2037 Treaty of Delhi that ended World War III. This was imagined well before Putin's current invasion of Ukraine, but I think it's pertinent because it represents what antiwar Republicans are refusing to recognize: the Ukraine conflict is likely to force a similar resolution, but at a much lower cost than anyone could have predicted. As Allahpundit put it at Hot Air more than a week ago , I’m showing my cards here: I don’t believe that much of the MAGA or MAGA-adjacent caterwauling about the cost of the Ukraine aid bill is on the level. Nationalists have never been sticklers about federal spending, after all. I posted these Mark Levin tweets earlier but let me post them again here. . . . The populist right and left resent that Ukraine is demonstrating the strength of the prevailing western liberal order on the battlefield at the expense...

The odd thing is how little intelligent coverage this development has had on the right-wing aggregators. As of this morning, it's well below the fold on the Red State blog , although there's an unusually thorough story on Breitbart . However, the interviewer above from the Jesuit AMERICA magazine draws Abp Cordileone out in some detail on the precise implications of his action. It is not, in his view, excommunication, which he believes would be more severe. Instead, she may attend mass, but she may not present herself for the sacrament, and he has instructed his priests not to admit her to the sacrament if she presents herself for it. However, Hot Air reports that "Pelosi has a second home in Santa Rosa, and the bishop there plans to honor Cordileone’s declaration." The story quotes The Pillar : After Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s archbishop said Friday she is barred from receiving the Eucharist, the bishop of the California diocese where Pelos...

The amount of grandstanding on the US Right against aid to Ukraine is disturbing -- I've got to hope it's cynical, because if people like Rand Paul actually believe what they're saying, it's even worse. The good news, though, is that even combined with the tankies on the Left, they're a minority. Here's a piece at the pro-Trump, anti-Ukraine Breitbart News : The Senate on Thursday passed legislation to give $40 billion to Ukraine in economic and military aid, while Americans suffer from food shortages and inflation. The Senate voted on H.R. 7691, the Ukraine Supplemental Aid Package, which passed 86-11. The vote featured strong Republican and Democrat support for the bill; however, some populist Senate Republicans opposed the legislation, believing that America should focus its efforts on domestic crises such as 40-year-high inflation and baby formula shortages. . . . Senate Republican populists could not stop the overwhelming Senate support to ...

One bit of information I've been chewing on recently is that by far the best reporting on the Russo-Ukraine war is at the uber-left Daily Kos. Up at that site yestesrday was Ukraine update: The tankies think everything—even the Ukraine invasion—is America's fault . "Tankie" was a new word for me. According to Wikipedia, "Tankie is a pejorative reference to hard-line, pro-Soviet members of the Communist Party of Great Britain." Kos goes on at the link, The pejorative term “tankie” comes from American leftists who defended the violent Soviet crackdown of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an uprising crushed by tanks. They were our allies during the Iraq War, so it may come as a shock seeing them become pathetic apologists for Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to reconstitute the Soviet empire. In their telling, the Ukraine invasion is the United State’s fault because it “expanded” NATO too aggressively, threatening poor Russia. How would we like it if Mexico jo...

The Musk Twitter takeover is devolving into delicious comedy : The CEO of Tesla had roiled the markets on Friday when he placed his Twitter takeover deal on a “temporary hold” while citing the need to gauge the exact proportion of bots or fake accounts that populated Twitter’s 229 million monetizable daily users in Q1 2022. Even though Musk had stated at the time that he was still “committed” to the deal, the CEO of Tesla recently revealed that he had received a call from Twitter’s legal team shortly thereafter for allegedly violating the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The call was prompted by a tweet from Musk where he revealed that Twitter’s in-house random sampling process used a sample size of 100. Bear in mind that Musk will have to pay $1 billion in breakup fees if the deal falls apart. This brings us to the crux of the matter. We had noted on Friday that Musk’s suspension of the takeover deal might be a ploy to renegotiate a lower price for Twitter. Well, the latest t...

I suppose that in a week where Amber Heard returns to the witness stand and the number of fake accounts on Twitter could be as high as 20%, there should be nothing unusual about congressional hearings on UFOs. But I was doing a web search on "UFO religion" and came up with an interesting piece on VOX -- interesting in how much it gets wrong: It’s a great time to believe in aliens. . . . According to Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the new book American Cosmic, belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion — and it isn’t nearly as fringe as you might think. More than half of American adults and over 60 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This tracks pretty closely with belief in God, and if Pasulka is right, that’s not an accident. . . . On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are cr...

Via the New York Post, NASA scientists plan to launch pictures of naked humans into space in the hope of luring aliens to us. The depictions will also include an invitation to respond should an intelligent alien race find the space nudes. Fortunately, the hypothetical aliens shouldn’t be too shocked by the unsolicited nudes. The pictures aren’t graphic photographs of naked humans but a drawing of a naked man and a woman next to a depiction of DNA. The man and woman are waving in an attempt to look more inviting. NASA scientists revealed the image in a study that’s part of a project called the “Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG). The image looks like this: But I have a bunch of questions, starting with whether this is redundant. It appears possible that the space aliens could be watching episodes of Naked and Afraid well before this transmission reaches them, after all. According to the BBC, A television company has joined forces with a social networking site to send a messag...

According to Wikipedia, The second law may be formulated by the observation that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease, as they always arrive at a state of thermodynamic equilibrium where the entropy is highest at the given internal energy. An increase in the combined entropy of system and surroundings accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, often referred to in the concept of the arrow of time. According to Wikipedia, Entropy is a scientific concept as well as a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. It's interesting that the definition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics above contains the word "evolution", since skeptics of neo-Darwinism often challenge the theory with reference to the Second Law. Somewhat restated, this will say that if you take a pot of water and cover it up, no matter how long you leave it, it won't spontan...

I was watching a Ukrainian's comment about the war on YouTube, and he made a key point: various political leaders have worried about "starting World War III", but it's important to be realistic: we're already in World War III. Right now, there's a massive tacit allied effort to wage a new war against Soviet revanchism, with Ukraine as the proxy, but the tacit alliance recognizes to one extent or another that the fate of Europe hinges on its outcome. The only remotely clear policy statement on allied war aims so far has come from Secretary Austin , “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” That should be at least relatively uncontroversial -- as Jennifer Rubin says in the link, "In reality, Austin simply stated the obvious." But what does this mean in context? I've already said here that the end of this war, even if its immediate cease-fire result is just a reestabl...