Why Is Everyone So Upset?

In the Washington Examiner yesterday:

Also distressing to hear were Hutchinson’s accounts of Trump’s repeated fits of rage, including dining table contents overturned and ketchup dishes thrown violently across the room. The worst by far, though, was that people immediately returning from being with Trump in the presidential vehicle told of the president trying to grab the wheel of the car to force it to be driven to the Capitol and then violently reaching for the neck of Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, who headed the president’s protective detail.

Hutchinson’s testimony confirmed a damning portrayal of Trump as unstable, unmoored, and absolutely heedless of his sworn duty to effectuate a peaceful transition of presidential power. Considering the entirety of her testimony, it is unsurprising that Hutchinson said she heard serious discussions of Cabinet members invoking the 25th Amendment that would have at least temporarily evicted Trump from office.

Trump is a disgrace. Republicans have far better options to lead the party in 2024. No one should think otherwise, much less support him, ever again.

David French -- recall that he mulled running against Trump in the 2016 primaries but wussed out at the last minute -- had this to say about the Hutchinson testimony:

Yes, Trump urged the mob to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, but he also said they should “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. That caveat was likely enough to spare him from prosecution.

That was yesterday’s analysis. Today’s is different. Because of a courageous woman named Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows.

Earlier this afternoon she gave the most extraordinary congressional testimony I’ve ever seen. She testified that the president was so committed to walking to the Capitol with his own supporters that he allegedly tried to grab the wheel of his Secret Service vehicle. She painted the picture of a president utterly out of control, a man so committed to preserving his own power that he approved of the riot and believed that Mike Pence deserved to face mob justice.

The big thing that strikes me here is that, as I've been saying, we're in the morning after phase of the 2020 moral panic. The problem is that David French and the Washington Examiner are still in 2016. Trump is out of office and 2022 is two years away, but the never Trumpers are relitigating the guy's fitness for office as though his actual term in the White House never took place -- and their problem is that so far, the polls suggest he's a contender in the next presidential election.

In fact, the consensus in the wake of the Dobbs decision is that, by nominating three justices who didn't prove to be squishes, Trump was the guy who solved Roe. So days later, the never Trumpers have decided he's unfit for office? Didn't he just accomplish what even the never Trumpers themselves thought might never be done? I've got to think the context here is important.

In fact, the anger from the sidelines tells me something about the nervousness among the gentry class ever since 2016. Across the spectrum, the respectable "conservative" commentariat, from George Will and David Brooks to John Podheretz and David French, sensed the rising power of the uncredentialed plebs who voted Trump into office despite their best efforts and now threaten to do it again.

I think it was the foreshocks of Dobbs that drove the great uncertainties that led to the 2020 media-driven dual panic over COVID and BLM, even though Dobbs will have little actual impact on who opts for abortion, especially in the blue states where complaints about the decision are strongest.

Another symptom in the news is the accelerating speculation about who'll run for president in 2024. So far, just in the past several days, we have Gavin Newsom taking out ads against Ron DeSantis in Florida, even though he's on the ballot in California, as best anyone can tell in order to raise his visibility for 2024. In the Washington Post, Youngkin meets with megadonors amid hints he’s mulling White House bid, while in the National Review, Kamala Harris Backtracks after Guaranteeing Biden Will Run in 2024.

Doesn't this simply acknowledge the continuing undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the 2020 election, that everyone should be jockeying for position so quickly in an atmosphere where almost nobody thinks the president we have is quite up to the job? That in itself, of course, simply reinforces Trump's continued standing and stokes the rage of the people who never liked him in the first place.

As I've been saying, moral panics are thought to reflect widespread uncertainty about social change. That change has been more visible this year -- for instance, the visible decline of Russia and its role in a world balance of power, as well as the collapse of the Nixon-era social compromises that included Roe v Wade, decided in 1973. Here's a pertinent comment at Slate:

Internal critics of the Democratic Party often say that its current leaders—who are for the most part in their 80s—believe too strongly in the value of political comity and the potential for bipartisan consensus. Tactically, strategically, and emotionally, this argument goes, Democrats have failed to realize that appeals to shared values and common purpose are no longer the most effective way to achieve tangible legislative results in the United States’ political system.

The old Nixon-era cliches that supported Earth Day (1970) and programs like affirmative action (Nixon executive order in 1969) were meant to paper over the issues that led to student protests and race riots in the 1960s. They've lost their effectiveness, though this raises the question of how effective they ever actually were.

At minimum, we can't go back to those days. As even Slate recognizes, the chief advocates and beneficiaries of doing that are in a fading generation. Trump was in many ways an opportunist who simply read the public mood, and the public mood isn't going to change.

Amber Heard Redux

I mentioned Raymond Chandler in yesterday's post. and for whatever reason, I kept thinking about him all day. Then, late in the afternoon, the news broke that at minimum, it was physically impossible for Trump to have grabbed the steering wheel of the SUV (or whatever it was) in which he was riding on January 6, and by this morning, the headlines emerged that the Secret Service was prepared to testify under oath that Trump never assaulted the driver or the other agent as former aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee.

Then I realized that a stock figure in Hollywood noir from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown is the pretty woman who tells lies. This is part of the secret deliciousness of the genre; women are portrayed as dishonest schemers, and it takes a disreputable but world-weary detective to penetrate the conventional wisdom and winkle out the truth, though the woman's attractiveness remains. Look at Sam Spade's final confrontation with Brigid O'Shaughnessy at the end of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon:

"But--but, Sam, you can't! Not after what we've been to each other. You can't--"

"Like hell I can't."

She took a long trembling breath. "You've been playing with me? Only pretending you cared--to trap me like this? You didn't--care at all? You didn't--don't--l-love me?"

"I think I do," Spade said. "What of it?" The muscles holding his smile in place stood out like wales. "I'm not Thursby. I'm not Jacobi. I won't play the sap for you."

. . . "Wait till I'm through and then you can talk. Fourth, no matter what I wanted to do now it would be absolutely impossible for me to let you go without having myself dragged to the gallows with the others. Next, I've no reason in God's world to think I can trust you and if I did this and got away with it you'd have something on me that you could use whenever you happened to want to. That's five of them. The sixth would be that, since I've also got something on you, I couldn't be sure you wouldn't decide to shoot a hole in me some day. Seventh, I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker. And eighth--but that's enough. All those on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won't argue about that. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we've got what? All we've got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you."

"You know," she whispered, "whether you do or not."

"I don't. It's easy enough to be nuts about you." He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. "But I don't know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won't. I've been through it before--when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I'll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I'd be sure I was the sap. Well, if I send you over I'll be sorry as hell--I'll have some rotten nights--but that'll pass. Listen." He took her by the shoulders and bent her back, leaning over her. "If that doesn't mean anything to you forget it and we'll make it this: I won't because all of me wants to--wants to say to hell with the consequences and do it--and because--God damn you--you've counted on that with me the same as you counted on that with the others." He took his hands from her shoulders and let them fall to his sides.

Isn't this something like the subtext of the Jonny Depp-Amber Heard trial? Pretty woman makes the disreputable but somehow authentic guy play the sap -- but in the end, she gets her comeuppance? Something in that story reverberates deeply within the American character. Now we have something oddly similar, pretty woman tries to make disreputable but somehow authentic ex-president play the sap, but she gets her comeuppance.

I think the conservative YouTube commentator Mark Dice has the best take:

At 4:10, he says, ". . . and it turns out that just two days ago, she got a brand new lawyer, which helps explain this 'surprise' testimony, but I think the real story here is that he's most likely negotiating a million-dollar book deal for her and needed this publicity to help lock it in." The lesson of the Depp-Heard trial is that the jury system relies on ordinary citizens with common sense to come to their own conclusion about the credibility of witnesses. I think the same eventually plays out in manufactured public scandals like the January 6 boondoggle -- enough ordinary citizens can have enough common sense to bring about just outcomes.

Nevertheless, the never Trumpers are still trying to rehabilitate Hutchinson. Take John Podhoretz:

[Trump] also wanted to drive to the Capitol in the lead and physically tussled with the Secret Service in his SUV when they weren’t going to do so because they could not guarantee his safety. She testified that Cippolone told her if Trump marched to the Capitol, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” And she reported Meadows saying of the chant to hang Vice President Mike Pence that Trump “doesn’t want to do anything,” and that “he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

You’re going to hear people call this “hearsay.” It is not hearsay. It is direct testimony of contemporaneous things said in Hutchinson’s earshot about events that were taking place while she was listening.

. . . He has so far been protected by Meadows and Cippolone because they have refused to testify to the committee under claims of executive privilege. . . . But they can testify if they choose. If they do not, they will, in essence, be allowing Hutchinson’s testimony to stand. If they do, and they do not say everything she said was a lie, her testimony will stand and be bolstered by them. And if they testify and say their recollections of the days were different, they will have to report in what way they were different—and will not be able to refuse to answer questions they find uncomfortable.

But it isn't just hearsay; important parts of it are now in dispute by parties who were present, and that inevitably affects Hutchinson's overall credibilty. What puzzles me is that the political circumstances that will surrround the 2024 election are far distant and at this stage impossible to predict. Why is everyone so excited about this pretty 25-year-old who's quickly proven herself a bad liar?

Hunter's Dad Is The First Enabler

I've been building a detailed history file on the First Crackhead now that reporters like Andrew Kerr have been able to dig deeper into previously password-protected files on his abandoned laptop. But even before Kerr's revelations, I find that I missed this story in the New York Post from last April:

Hunter Biden — who’s admitted battling addictions to booze and crack cocaine for much of his life — is living across the street from a swank rehab center where Lindsay Lohan once spent a summer drying out, The Post has learned.

The scandal-scarred first son’s $20,000-a-month rental home in Southern California is located just steps from the Cliffside Malibu, one of four “residential homes” run by its namesake parent company.

The price for “luxury,” in-patient treatment there isn’t advertised, but reportedly ran $68,000 for a 30-day stay nearly a decade ago.

The map at the top of this post comes from that story (click on the image for a larger view). I first mentioned his Malibu rental in this post back in March, which linked to another story in the New York Post from July 27, 2021 that first refers to this Malibu rental:

Hunter Biden has a new Malibu rental with an art studio, according to reports.

. . . The rental was listed for $20,000 a month in April, and the listing was removed on May 10, two months ago, signaling that a rental agreement had been reached (though TMZ reported that the rental began four months ago when the property was first listed).

. . . Hunter recently left a $5.4 million Venice Beach house — which was guarded by the Secret Service — that cost an estimated $25,000 per month and which he found after living in Hollywood Hills, The Post reported. The new rental is also guarded by the Secret Service, TMZ has reported.

Only later has it emerged that the Secret Service rents an adjoining luxury home that serves as a detail headquarters for $30,000 per month. It subsequently came out that the $20,000 monthly rental and other unspecified expenses have been paid by a Hollywood attorney, Kevin Morris.

But now we have the news that this rental coincidentally adjoins a self-described luxury rehab facility. That program says to its prospective clients:

We understand that you have utilized your valuable resources to hire us to do a job for you, and also understand that you have hired us because it is a job that you now understand that you cannot do for yourself and as such, have agreed to let us do the work you have entrusted us to do.

When you enter the recovery program at Rise in Malibu you can expect your individualized treatment programming to include the following therapeutic work and associated therapies. . .

As best I can infer, this means that patients are submitting to a program that includes involuntary confinement, no matter how luxurious the surroundings may be. It's hard not to think that the rentals across the street, the one for Hunter and the adjoining one for his Secret Service minders, are effectively part of a more holistic treatment plan that basically keeps this guy under very, very close control, with lots of therapy to go with. And I assume there's a fee to be paid, and Kevin Morris is at least the front for it.

What does the tab amount to here? It's hard to avoid thinking Hunter is in some sort of adjunct program at Cliffside Malibu, presumably individualized for his oh-so-unique needs and closely coordinated with the Secret Service next door. Ten years ago, your run-of-the-mill addicted wastrel cost $68,000 to stay there for a month. At minimum, we must be talking a high five-figure monthly payment that's so far lasted more than a year and presumably will continue through January 2025, if not longer. I've got to assume Kevin Morris is picking this up as well. Again, who's he fronting for?

For a certain amount of context, let's look at a new Andrew Kerr investigative piece that came out just yesterday:

Hunter Biden spent over $30,000 on escorts, many of whom were linked to ".ru" Russian email addresses and worked with an “exclusive model agency" called UberGFE during a 3 1/2 month period between November 2018 and March 2019.

He managed to do so thanks in part to Joe Biden committing to wiring him a total of $100,000 to help pay his bills from December 2018 through January 2019.

In one instance, Joe Biden wired his son $5,000 while he was actively engaged with an UberGFE escort. In another, texts indicated Hunter Biden convinced his father to wire him $20,000 to finance his stay at a New York City drug rehabilitation program that he never checked into.

The most we can say for now is that Hunter's extended binge through much of 2018 and into 2019 was costing Joe tens of thousands each month, as well as representing both a security risk and a potential major scandal at a time when Joe was putting the wheels in motion to run for president in 2020. Indeed, in March of 2020, Hunter finally settled with the ex-stripper mother of his child born out of wedlock for an undisclosed amount, taking that issue off the radar. I wouldn't look too far to find Kevin Morris in this picture.

Something had to be done. In fact, I would guess that about the time of the settlement with the stripper, a plan had been formulated to keep Hunter out of the news, but it didn't come to full fruition until the whole Malibu program was set up about a year later. My guess is we won't learn a whole lot more until after the November election, but there's got to be an awful lot of money being spent here.

Didn't Raymond Chandler write about rich Hollywood types in secret luxury rehab? Where is Humphrey Bogart when we really need him? Heck, where's Jack Nicholson? There's a Hollywood classic waiting to be made here.

Trump And The Fallout From Dobbs

As the impact of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision bgegins to sink in, after a few days, people are starting to recognize that for good or ill, this was Donald Trump's doing. For instance,

To the Never Trump people: Elections matter.

. . . Because Donald J. Trump was president and because he had the courage to stick with solidly conservative jurists and because he, unlike Never Trumpers, knows how to hold the line, abortion now goes back to the people to decide.

. . . And to those who sought a perfect vessel for perfect policy, remember, politics is about wielding power and creating policy to wield that power. Sitting on a perch waiting for the perfect politician to achieve policies is a fool’s errand. All politicians are flawed, some more than others, and yet, a flawed politician can achieve good outcomes with courage.

Breitbart News provided a partial transcript of Trump's remarks at an Illinois rally on Saturday:

We have very big news. Maybe the biggest, right from the United States Supreme Court. Yesterday the Court handed down a victory for the Constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life. This breakthrough is the answer to the prayers of millions and millions of people. And these prayers have gone on for decades and decades. They’ve been praying, and now those prayers have been answered.

. . . I promised to nominate judges and justices who would stand up for the original meaning of the Constitution and who would honestly and faithfully interpret the law as written. We got almost 300 federal judges, and three great Supreme Court justices confirmed to do exactly that.

It's worth noting that although, as Trump himself points out, this was the result of a 50-year campaign by generations of people, it was Trump's instinctive willingness to go for broke in 2016 that made the final difference. But Rolling Stone, of all sources, raises questions about Trump's private views:

Republicans spent Friday celebrating the end of Roe v. Wade and praising Donald Trump for making it happen. Trump himself, multiple sources tell Rolling Stone, is far less excited.

Publicly, the former president took credit for abrogating the rights of millions of American women, putting out a statement saying Roe’s repeal was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”

The rest of the story is behnd a paywall, but this site gives a summary:

However, the report quotes an associate of the former president who said he has been "sh*tting" on the decision since an early draft was leaked weeks ago.

. . . [P]rivately, the former president is anxious about what the end of Roe, and the flood of extreme Republican state-level anti-abortion laws it will unleash, will mean for the GOP’s electoral prospects — and for his own.

On that note, the Trump insider admitted, "He keeps sh*tting all over his greatest accomplishment. When you speak to him, it’s the response of someone fearing the backlash and fearing the politics of what happens when conservatives actually get what they want [on abortion]," before adding, "I do not think he’s enjoying the moment as much as many of his supporters are, to be honest with you.”

I think Trump's problem for his 2024 prospects is that new issues have come up, most importantly the economy, but also Ukraine, and now the question of what next on abortion. He's had little to say on Ukraine, except that it wouldn't have taken place if he'd been president. He needs to be more specific, and he needs to provide a realisic plan forward, especially how to deal with Russia's seriously reduced capabilities with or without Putin.

Now he also needs to provide a consistent stance on how to proceed with the abortion issue left to the states -- after all, wasn't that going to be the predictable outcome of any decision by his court overturning Roe all along? Some states were inevitably going to be stricter than others. How can that be making him anxious?

Rolling Stone, of course, has a history of fake stories, and its "insider" here is anonymous. But if Trump doesn't begin to articulate a fuller path forward in the runup to 2024, he's going to lose out.

Intersectionality Goes Only So Far

So far, opinon against the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade has been fairly predictable, centering on how Dobbs will impact poor women of color in states that limit their ability to get an abortion, since it will cost them money to travel to a state with more liberal policies. This, of course, inadvertently reveals the original purpose of Planned Parenthood, which was eugenic, aimed at increasing the rate of abortion among non-whites.

The assumption, or at least the hope, of the anti-Dobbs faction is that non-whites will recognize that reducing access to abortion in even this limited way is against their interests, when African-Americans in particular have come to understand that by limiting their birthrate through state-encouraged abortion, the ruling class also limits their numbers at the ballot box.

Another difficulty is that as a practical matter, the general population covered by the designation LGBTQ+ is much less affected by access to abortion, since pregnancies result exclusively from the male-female reproductive act, leaving aside IVF or artificial insemination, although even these in fact are intended to induce a pregnancy that is by implication desired. Thus even if drag queens, say, demonstrate against Dobbs, they're one step removed from the actual issue at hand.

And this leaves aside the subtext of a drag queen performance, which carries with it a certain cluster of feelings about women that include resentment and hatred, with an exaggerated male-oriented portrayal of female vanity and histrionics. I did a web search on "drag queen abortion" just for the heck of it, expecting to find nothing, but instead I found a sequence of images. The least disturbing is the one at the top of this post. Others, like those on the right, are more gruesome. They're anything but a sympathetic portrayal of a woman's right to choose. On the other hand, they're probably much closer to the actual intent of the whole drag queen performance, illustrating a fundamental distrust of women, particularly involving what's portrayed here as a deep suspicion of motherhood.

The elites fetishize drag queens at their peril. I've already noted here that Speaker Pelosi, vain, flamboyant, and histrionic, is just one step removed from a drag queen herself, and that's not good for women. I'm not at all sure if having drag queens in an anti-Dobbs parade would be a good idea.

But there's another issue. I've not been a Rod Dreher fan here, since I don't think his adoption of Orthodoxy or even before that Roman Catholicism was ever authentic, but he does get one thing right in this recent piece:

There is an obvious Luciferian connection between the twin sacred rites of abortion and sex change. Both assert human will over life and the generative order. Both refuse the givenness of Creation. Both insist that the autonomous choosing individual has ultimate power over life and death, male and female. Both rites are necessary to upholding the Sexual Revolution, which is the event that gives meaning to the lives of the American ruling class.

We are now seeing how much that ruling class hates those it rules.

A reader writes that he doesn’t expect mass violence over Dobbs — not an abortion-related repeat of the George Floyd riots. Those riots were carried out by black people and white antifa. The kind of demographic most upset over the fall of Roe — educated middle class women — will never risk their professional status to commit acts of criminal violence, he predicts.

There are other practical problems with protesting Dobbs. My wife notes that the biggest riots so far have been in places like California, which will always have permissive laws on abortion. Thus for women in such states, some other form of civil disobedience will be needed to make their point. The most obvious would be to get preganant, travel to a state with restrictive abortion laws like North Dakota, get a back alley abortion there, and die from it. After all, isn't that the equivalent of a sit-in?

The cartoon at left represents a return to a major pre-Roe argument for legalized abortion, that if it's not legal, it won't be safe, and women will be forced to use coat hangers to peform the procedure on themselves. Well, I was in college and graduate school pre-Roe, and friends and classmates from time to time found the need to find someone who'd do it. Being middle class or better, none needed a coat hanger, and none died, although their children of course always did.

The coat hanger argument was never sincere, it was always a way to hold someone else hostage, when the prosperous educated classes would always have an alternative, legal or not. Everyone drank underage back then, after all, and many smoked pot. The issue simply doesn't affect the educated classes no matter what law is passed in what state, but the other side of the coin is that the argument from the educated classes that the non-white poor need it is also racist: the assumption is that the non-white poor are too stupid and too promiscuous by nature to conduct their sexual activities prudently. This goes back to Margaret Sanger's eugenic purpose behind Planned Parenthood.

There's another problem with the intersectionality fallacy behind protesting Dobbs: it arises from the current movement for synthetic sexual identity. If men can have periods and get pregnant, men also can need abortions. I note that woke companies like Disney have announced they'll fund travel for women employees to get abortions in states that will permit it. But what if I'm a man who works for Disney in, say, Florida? Won't Disney say since I'm a man and can get pregnant, they'll pay for me to go to California for an abortion?

You might well answer sure, just show Disney your doctor's note or your pregnancy test. But not so fast -- the HIPAA Privacy Rule makes all medical records fully confidential. It's illegal for an employer to ask for any medical record, especially one that involves an abortion. I would have a cause of action against Disney if they refused to pay for my trip to California for an abortion on the basis that I'm a man and can't prove I'm pregnant.

This will work its way through, but it's going to take some time. But then it took time to override Roe.

More Trickles Out About The Paul Pelosi DUI

In terms of overall deliciousness, few recent events can match the DUI arrest of Paul Pelosi, the Speaker's husband, over the Memorial Day weekend in Napa, CA. My wife and I follow it with special interest, because we frequently visit there, and when we do, we regularly pass the site.

Information about the circumstances has been tightly controlled. Thanks to near-universal use of police body and dash cameras, we may assume footage exists of the arrest and Pelosi's field sobriety test, and given the popularity of TV shows that use such footage, it's not hard to imagine what it was like even if we can't see the actual episode. This is part of the deliciousness behind the whole story.

But if the political establishment ever thought they'd be able to keep a lid on things, they're of course mistaken. The arrest and subsequent court proceedings are public records, and eventually everything will come out. The district attorney issued charges this past week, which inevitably brought out more details of the incident:

He was charged with driving under the influence causing injury and driving with a blood-alcohol level of .08 percent or over.

The DA is charging those two as misdemeanors, even though in California they’re “wobblers” and can be charged as either misdemeanors or felonies, based on the evidence and the District Attorney’s discretion. They note that the decision was based on the injury and is consistent with the way they normally charge things. Yes, it’s normal that they judge by the seriousness of the injury. So either that’s an indication that a) there was an injury, but it wasn’t serious or b) there’s a more serious injury and he’s getting a break. Now, one of the problems in this case has been that they haven’t been releasing all the information. There hasn’t been a police report released of the accident and the arrest. Prior news reports had not indicated any injury; now we’re suddenly told that there was injury. So what’s the nature of the injury? We don’t know.

His blood-alcohol level wasn’t tested until more than two hours after the collision, at 12:32 a.m. The crash was at 10:17 p.m. So if it was .082 at that time, it was higher at the time of the accident.

Other accounts note that he wan't booked until 4:13 AM the following morning, which raises inevitable questions about the delay. It's hard not to think that once Paul came to his senses, he was on the phone to Nancy and her handlers, with a great deal of back-and-forth at the federal, state, and county level. In any case,

The Pelosis have hired some PR folk to handle this matter, including, apparently, SF politico Lee Houskeeper, and Napa-based "crisis manager" Larry Kamer. One of their first orders of business was refuting press reports that Paul Pelosi was arrested for a similar driving incident four years ago — that was apparently a different person named Paul Pelosi?

Along with the new information that the Jeep driver who hit Pelosi's Porsche was injured in the collision, there's the intriguing question of whether there was a witness to the crash. According to the RedState link above,

Fox’s Jesse Watters let loose on “Paulie P” (as he terms him) on his show after the charges were announced, including revelations from a new explosive New York Times story.

. . . As Watters says, where did the witness come from? On the side of the road in rural Napa County late at night? Watters speculates the person was in the car. We don’t know whether or not they were, though Watters has spoken to a member of the Fire Department who says they know the answer but they’re being pressured by the District Attorney’s office to keep quiet.

Several questions come up in my mind. Fire Department? That suggests that not only was there an injury, but paramedics must have been on scene. Just how many were injured if someone else was in Pelosi's car? And just who might that have been? I suspect it was an attractive female companion of the Speaker's husband. Lots to keep quiet here.

I would guess there's a great deal of baksheesh being handed around to all parties, Pelosi handlers promising it'll all be taken care of, don't worry about a thing. Well, that'd better be the case.

Biden And The Trans Agenda

One of the "incredible transitions" President Biden has sought most consistently to impose on US society is far-reaching accommodations for transgender people, an extremely tiny part of the population not even supported by much more numerous gays and lesbians, who insist they're attracted instead to same-sex people based on their existing sexual identity and don't want any sort of makeover, surgical, hormonal, or cosmetic.

Recent examples include implementing transgender-friendly airport screening procedures on the Transgender Day of Visibility last April, including unspecified "changes to scanners used for screening. . . . intended to make procedures less invasive". As far as I can tell, based on scanning images I see on media, they currently show very little flesh of any sort. but the concern appears to be that what minimal shadowy outlines the scanners now reveal could still establish that the frumpy middle-aged woman going through security is actually a frumpy middle-aged guy. So we block all that out, or something.

Yesterday, the Biden administration announced proposed changes to Title IX:

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the proposed changes would completely eliminate the concept of gender-specific sports and spaces, such as restrooms and locker rooms, and would allow students to freely use whichever facilities they feel like. The new regulations would also label any instances of someone not using proper “pronouns” as sexual harassment.

The proposed changes will effectively abolish sex-separate activities and spaces, including bathrooms and locker rooms. They would also define misuse of gender pronouns as a form of sexual harassment.

. . . "A shift from biological sex to gender identity means that girls and women will be forced to accept the presence of biological males in what have always been single-sex spaces." said Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for Parents Defending Education.

The frumpy middle-aged woman at the top of this post is Jennifer Pritzer, a member of the wealthy and influential Pritzger family, the first transgender billionaire. A little-noticed article that came out recently in The Tablet provides disturbing insight into the well-financed and well-organized plan to impose the transgender agenda on everyone:

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

The author says she has

stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans. . . is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

The piece goes on to detail the history and extent of Pritzker family philanthropy, in particular to introduce and normalize the entirely new concept of SSI into universities and medical schools. The programs involved can be truly bizarre:

[Jennifer} Pritzker’s philanthropy is also active in Canada, where Jennifer has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists.

The conclusion to draw here is first, that the imposition of SSI is a well-organized and well-funded agenda; second, that it's top-down, driven by the Pritzgers and apparently other wealthy families. It's worth noting that other progressive developments since the 1800s have been at least nominally oriented toward the working and middle classes -- social insurance, collective bargaining, college financial aid, or civil rights. This, on the other hand, is supported by billionaires on behalf of perceived injustices toward a tiny and ill-defined group, and indeed, the implications -- ending sexual segregation in school restrooms and locker rooms, for instance -- are wildly unpopular with the working and middle classes.

Another detail worth noting is that the SSI agenda isn't completely separate from the new COVID-based public health agenda. The most prominent transsexual in the US government, of course, is Dr Rachel Levine, who prior to her appointment as Assistant Secretary for Health imposed some of the most restrictive lockdown measures in the US as Pennsylvania state secretary of health. Jennifer Pritzger's cousin, Illinois Gov J B Pritzker, also imposed extreme lockdown measures there, some of which were removed by the courts.

But here's the big question: why is Scranton Joe, the putative champion of the working class, so firmly attached to this agenda? He's managed to become most closely identified with transgenderism/SSI and the Green New Deal. SSI in particular isn't a vote-getter; it isn't even popular with the traditional gay and lesbian Democrat base. I can only assume there's money involved, big money, over and above the political process.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

Recently published remarks by Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit editors have drawn a lot of controversy from conservatives, including conservative Catholics. I discussed his remarks about Ukraine the other day, which as a conservative Catholic I find unobjectionable. Today I want to look at the problem of what he calls in his remarks "restorationism":

[T]he Council that some pastors remember best is that of Trent. What I’m saying is not nonsense.

Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of “restorers” – for example, in the United States there are many – is significant. An Argentine bishop told me that he had been asked to administer a diocese that had fallen into the hands of these “restorers.” They had never accepted the Council. There are ideas, behaviors that arise from a restorationism that basically did not accept the Council. The problem is precisely this: in some contexts the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes a century for a Council to take root. We still have forty years to make it take root, then!

So, of whom specifically does the Holy Father speak? Well, a prominent conservative Catholic has piped up and given us an example. Anthony Esolen on Monday published an essay, "I Am a Restorationist". As a Catholic convert, I've got to say this presents me with a dilemma in my understanding of Catholicism. In his remarks, Pope Francis makes it clear in so many words that "restorationists" have never accepted the Second Vatican Council. As the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, his opinion on this matter should carry great weight.

The idea that there are Catholics who haven't accepted the Second Council isn't a figment of Francis's imagination. Prof Esolen has simply stood up and, apparently fully accepting Francis's terms, identified himself as one of them. That a conservative US Cathollic magazine would publish this essay simply confirms Francis's observation that there are many "restorers" in the US, i.e. people who do not accept the authority of an ecumenical council.

As Bp Barron has said, you don't get any higher authority in the Catholic Church than an ecumenical council. You don't find any clearer voice in the Church than a pope endorsing an ecumenical council. So for a prominent conservative Catholic to come out publicly to say by clear implication that he's against an ecumenical council and against the pope is, at minimum, problematic.

In fact, recognizing that Esolen is an Ivy Leaguer who has made his career as an academic, I would expect a closely reasoned, heavily footnoted case in support of his position, but this is precisely what we don't get. His argument, as far as I can piece it out, is that in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholics obeyed the Church's authority without question, but look where it got them:

When our pastor removed the marble communion rail with its mosaic inlays of Eucharistic symbols (a basket of five loaves, two fish, a bunch of grapes, the Lamb of God), we figured he knew what he was doing, and we submitted. When he whitewashed the church walls, eliminating stenciled patterns of the fleur-de-lis, so that what had been warm and shady was now bare, with no color connection between the stained-glass windows, the mural paintings of figures from the Old Testament, and the painted ceiling above, we figured he knew what he was doing, and we obeyed. When he covered the hexagonal floor tiles, white and dark green in cruciform patterns, with a bright-red carpet, we wiped our feet and obeyed.

So, er, does this mean Catholics no longer need to accept Church authority? Prof Esolen doesn't like vernacular mass or versus populum celebration. Speaker Pelosi wants abortion to be OK. Who's right? He's proven absolutely nothing.

But also, his argument is, first, emotional, and second, anecdotal. We may regret unjustifiable redecoration in specific cases, and reaction may be along the line of, "My parents were married in that church! I was baptized and confirmed there! Look what they've done!" But that isn't an argument against the Second Council. The Council documents -- I've read them in an edition Bp Barron sponsored with the aim of having them available to contemporary Catholics -- have nothing to say about carpet or whitewash.

Bp Barron in his commentary there himself cites examples like a priest who rode a motorcycle down the aisle to the altar and makes the point that there have been lots of misunderstandings, which are in the process of being corrected. But here Pope Francis suggests it takes a century for a Council to take root in any case.

In many ways, Esolen's argument is post hoc propter hoc.

Sexual morality was the obvious candidate for progress. I understood nothing of it when I was a schoolboy, but when we high school freshmen had a “values clarification” class instead of a real study of Scripture or the catechism, I figured the sister knew what she was doing. It was a feature of the new Church—the Church knew more and better about sex than she used to.

Though most of us in that high school bore an old residue of moral sense, by the time I went to college in 1977, the Church in her ordinary life—in her preaching and her obvious practice—offered us no guard rails, no direction. I never thought of myself as disobedient because the Church, in her practical life, did not think of me so, either. Love pastes over a multitude of sins.

But by 1992, the Church had published a new comprehensive Catechism that contained a full explanation of traditional Catholic moral theology, including sexuality. The priests in our parish often discuss the sacrament of reconciliation, including the need for examination of conscience with reference to Church teaching. Has Prof Esolen attended a diocesan mass at all lately? Has he gone to confession in a diocesan parish? Last I checked, if I confess to a sin, the priest will still give me advice on how to avoid it and prescribe a penance before he absolves me.

The problem with Esolen's argument is that it parades out the traditionalist cliches -- tasteless redecorations, bad architecture, pride flags in the sanctuary -- without addressing them as either outliers or aberrations that are largely in the process of being corrected by a current generation of mainstream priests and bishops like, for instance, Bp Barron. Barron, a fully qualified theologian, is attacked by conservatives who have no particular qualifications as somehow a popularizer or a Bp Feelgood. (Indeed, I've had e-mails from restorationists who say the same about Fulton Sheen.)

Nobody attacks the Council documents themselves. Beyond that, the implication in their resistance to Pope Francis is that he's in some way illegitimate; indeed, the most extreme version of this position is that Pius XII was the last legitimate pope.

The problem with all this is that if Francis isn't a legitimate pope, or the Second Council was illegitimate, these are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof. If these proofs can be made, an Ivy Leaguer like Prof Esolen ought to be able to make them. But he falls back on the same old chestnuts, the whitewashed walls or carpeted floors in specific parishes, the sister who bore a child out of wedlock, the divorces, the pedophiles. But how do any of these directly illegitimize, say, Sacrosanctum Concilium? Lumen Gentium? Gaudium et Spes? Does an illegitimate Council also delegitimize the 1992 Catechism?

I'd be curious to know if Prof Esolen has even read them, or if he's read the commentary on them by Bp Barron in his recent edition. Or do the documents somehow not matter, since although Prof Esolen identifies himself as someone who rejects the Second Council, he has nothing to say about them in this version of hier stehe ich? Wouldn't a serious, well-footnoted refutation of the Council documents and, just for starters, Bp Barron's interpretation of them in his edition, be a miniumum starting point?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Reaction To The EU's Move On Kaliningrad

Media reaction to the situation in Kaliningrad has been slow. The best I've seen so far is from CNBC:

Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, commented Tuesday that “it’s fair to say that Kaliningrad is a strategic imperative for Russia” noting that defending and sustaining it certainly is.

“Russia will react for sure, the only question is what that will be ... [and] what Russia could do militarily,” he noted.

“A land attack to drive a corridor through Lithuania would be a direct attack on Lithuania triggering NATO Article 5 defence. Putin knows this - that’s war with NATO. Can Putin afford that when he is struggling to deliver on even his now much-reduced strategic objectives in Ukraine? He would also have to launch an assault through Belarus, stretching his supply lines, and splitting his forces,” he noted.

Ash suggested that Russia could seek to use its sizeable naval assets in the Baltic Sea to enforce some kind of tit-for-tat blockade on Lithuanian trade although again that would be seen as a huge escalation by both NATO and the EU. “It would then be a fine dividing line whether that would trigger the NATO Article 5 defence,” however, he noted.

When asked on Wednesday whether Russia’s response would be exclusively diplomatic or would go further, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said “the answer is no. They will not be diplomatic, but practical.”

“As for retaliatory measures, now possible measures are being worked out in an interdepartmental format. It was stated to both Lithuania and the EU through their diplomatic missions in Moscow about the inadmissibility of such actions and the need to change the steps taken and return the situation to a legitimate course,” she said.

“If this is not done, then, of course, and this was emphasized at all levels in Moscow, retaliatory actions will be inevitable.”

Following the initial announcement, Lithuania extended its ban to include highway traffic.

Yesterday I quoted Reuters concerning EU envoy Markus Ederer's visit to the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he is reported to have asked the Russians at the meeting "to refrain from escalatory steps and rhetoric". The relative rhetorical stance here is intriguing: the EU appears to be giving Putin a parental pat on the heard, telling him to calm down. As far as anyone can tell so far, Putin has few options that woud not trigger NATO Article 5, when his own military is pinned down in Ukraine while NATO's forces aren't engaged there and free to act over Lithuania and Kaliningrad if needed.

But the current Kaliningrad crisis is just a follow-on to an earlier Russian srategic loss. According to CNN:

In 2002, the EU and Moscow reached an agreement on travel between Russia and Kaliningrad, ahead of Poland and Lithuania joining the European Union in 2004. When those countries joined, the exclave became surrounded on three sides by EU territory. Russia says the 2002 agreement has now been violated.

In other words, since 2002, there's been an uneasy equilibrium on the Baltic that effectively finessed a Russian strategic loss with the entry of Poland and Lithuania to the EU and NATO. (Poland joined NATO in 1999; Lithuania in 2004.) The botched Russian invasion of Ukraine, by revealing Russian military weakness and proccupying Russia there, shifted this equilibrium out of balance and resumes the long-term trend of Russian strategic decline.

But an interim result will leave Russian satellite Belarus surrounded on three sides by Poland, Lithuania, and a west-facing Ukraine, whose membership in the EU and de facto NATO membership are inevitable. The problem for Putin is this domino, as well as others, is still to fall.

Nobody's Noticed Kaliningrad

Most of the aggregators missed yesterday's biggest story, but CNSNews had it: Russia Claims NATO Ally Lithuania Is Blockading Kaliningrad, Warns it Will Respond. Over the past week or so, I've begun to think the biggest outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be in the Baltics, and Kaliningrad has become the locus. According to Wikipedia, following its capture by the Red Army ihn April 1945,

The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it under Soviet administration. The city was renamed to Kaliningrad [from Königsberg] in 1946 in honor of Soviet revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is governed as the administrative centre of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost oblast of Russia.

As a major transport hub, with sea and river ports, the city is home to the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy, and is one of the largest industrial centres in Russia. It was deemed the best city in Russia in 2012, 2013 and 2014 in Kommersant's magazine The Firm's Secret, the best city in Russia for business in 2013 according to Forbes, and was ranked fifth in the Urban Environment Quality Index published by Minstroy in 2019.

The problem is that Kaliningrad Oblast is an exclave, Russian territory outside Russian borders. Land connections between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia must transit Lithuania. Per the CNSNews story,

A new potential flashpoint between Moscow and NATO emerged when Lithuania, citing incoming European Union sanctions on Russian steel and other ferrous metals, said those items could no longer be transported across its territory to Kaliningrad.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it summoned a senior Lithuanian diplomat and informed her Russia viewed the actions as “openly hostile.”

It said the ministry had informed charge d’affaires Virginija Umbrasiene “that if in the near future cargo transit between the Kaliningrad region and the rest of the territory of the Russian Federation through Lithuania is not restored in full, then Russia reserves the right to take actions to protect its national interests.”

. . . The governor of Kaliningrad, Anton Alikhanov, claimed earlier that the restriction would impact 40-50 percent of goods moving between the region and the rest of Russia.

. . . [O]ver the coming months more and more goods will be affected: E.U. bans on Russian imports will target wood, cement, fertilizers, seafood, and liquor from July 10; coal and other solid fossil fuels from August 10; and crude oil from December 5.

The EU disputes Russia's claim that this is a "blockade", but given the context that Kaliningrad is one of the largest industrial centers in Russia as well as a naval base, the EU sanctions on Russia will turn into a major handicap, "blockade" or not. And as of earlier this month, via an official NATO release:

Fourteen NATO allies along with two NATO partner nations, Finland and Sweden, are currently participating in the exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS 22) with over 45 ships, more than 75 aircraft and 7,500 personnel.

This premier maritime-focused annual exercise kicked off from Stockholm, Sweden, on 05 June. It takes place in the Baltic region from June 5-17 and provides a unique training opportunity to strengthen combined response capabilities critical to preserving freedom of navigation and security in the Baltic Sea. This is the 51st iteration of the exercise series, which began in 1972.

Let's ask a question here. Sweden applied to join NATO only this past May 15, and only three weeks later, they're hosting NATO's premier maritime-focused annual exercise? I'm sorry, things in the real world don't happen justlikethat. Pope Francis is no dummy when he speaks of "the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented". The Baltic is a key inflection point here, and it's been part of Western strategic thinking all along. According to Reuters,

Moscow summoned EU envoy Markus Ederer to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday. EU spokesperson Peter Stano said Ederer asked the Russians at the meeting "to refrain from escalatory steps and rhetoric".

The standoff creates a new source of confrontation on the Baltic, a region already set for a security overhaul that would hem in Russia's sea power as Sweden and Finland apply to join NATO and put nearly the whole coast under alliance control.

I'm starting to think what's really going on is that the West was completely surprised by the Russian inabiity to succeed in its Ukraine invasion, and there's been a hasty recalculation -- Russia has committed and largely squandered a major part of its military force in Ukraine, and it's now vulnerable in the Baltic and likely elsewhere. Lithuania is a NATO member and in particular has closely aligned its military planning with Poland. Any Russian military threat against NATO is now simply idle.

Putin is in serious danger of losing important Russian territory and is likely unable to do much about it. This is an interesting development indeed.

Pope Francis On Ukraine

There's been a certain amount of commentary -- at minimum, somewhat bewildered -- about Pope Francis's recent remarks on Ukraine. The full text of a wider-ranging exchange in which he made them is here. I think they should also be taken in the context of official remarks by Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State:

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, has reiterated that Ukraine has a “legitimate” right to defend itself from Russian aggression, but he also has warned that weapons being sent there by other countries could lead to a “terrible” escalation of the war.

“Ukraine is resisting Russia based on this principle,” Parolin said in a recent exclusive interview with CNA, referring to the right of self defense.

They should also be seen in the context of CCC 2309:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

I've always been impressed by the respect this shows for Clausewitz's view that chance and uncertainty, which bring guesswork and luck to the fore, play a major part in war. Thus evaluation of conditions for moral legitimacy ultimately depends on the prudential judgment of political leadership, and the conditions will always be subject to change. Consequently, there can be no black and white. The Vatican's official position leans in favor of Ukraine, but potential escalation, taking into consideration the power of weapons that could be used, could change the conditions for moral legitimacy.

I don't see how Francis's remarks contradict existing Church policy or teaching:

To answer this question we have to move away from the normal pattern of “Little Red Riding Hood”: Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad guy. Here there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys, in an abstract sense. Something global is emerging, with elements that are very much intertwined. A couple of months before the war started I met a head of state, a wise man, who speaks very little, very wise indeed. After we talked about the things he wanted to talk about, he told me that he was very concerned about the way NATO was moving. I asked him why, and he said, “They are barking at the gates of Russia. They do not understand that the Russians are imperialists and will allow no foreign power to approach them.” He concluded, “The situation could lead to war.” This was his opinion. On February 24, the war began. That head of state was able to read the signs of what was taking place.

What we are seeing is the brutality and ferocity with which this war is being carried out by the troops, generally mercenaries, used by the Russians. The Russians prefer to send in Chechen and Syrian mercenaries. But the danger is that we only see this, which is monstrous, and we do not see the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented. And note the interest in testing and selling weapons. It is very sad, but at the end of the day that is what is at stake.

It seems to me that, irrespective of any specifics Francis may have in mind, trends like the development of a pan-Baltic economic zone that I've discussed here are in fact making Putin and others in Russia uncomfortable. I've said here that I don't think either Finland or Sweden mooted NATO membership out of the blue after Russia invaded Ukraine; they perceived the need for such a thing well before last February. The invasion simply created a credible pretext. Isn't this something Francis and the unnamed head of state might credibly have discussed? Indeed, Francis is an ethnic Italian whose mind is likely to move in a Machiavellian direction, not without reason here.

So I don't see anything off with the observation that factors leading to the war were "perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented". Indeed, Francis's position is on the face of it not inconsistent with Trump's position since the February invasion, which has been that it would not have taken place if he were president. We can argue that neither Francis nor Trump understands the circumstances, but they are arguable, and indeed, it's arguable that there were good reasons Putin didn't invade Ukraine while Trump was president. These matters are well within the prudential judgment of political leaders.

Farther down, Francis makes an observation I've made here, and indeed, President Zelensky has said the same thing:

The world is at war. A few years ago it occurred to me to say that we are living the third world war piece by piece. For me, today, World War III has been declared.

He goes on to ask,

What is happening to humanity that we have had three world wars in a century?

Good question. Recall that a generation ago, US policymakers were being told history was over, there weren't going to be any more world wars. What was wrong with US policy planning that kept us oblivious? Isn't Francis asking that very question? Couldn't political leadership have anticipated developments better?

Frankly, I think Francis is underrated. In fact, I've come to like the guy.

Wait A Moment: Just How Many Laptops Has Hunter Lost?

I ask this because a new figure (at least, new to me) has been making the talking head rounds, Andrew Kerr, an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner. Kerr is currently best known for revealing a Dec. 3, 2018 recording, previously undiscovered on the laptop Hunter abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, in which Hunter rambles at length on the theme, "Yeah, my father will take any policy positions that I want him to adopt."

In at least one interview, though, Kerr suggests this isn't the only one of Hunter's laptops that's gone astray. I haven't been able to find any hard-copy piece by Kerr on the subject, but I did finally run into another piece from last summer here:

In an explicit video obtained by the Daily Mail, Hunter Biden told a sex worker back in 2019 that allegedly, Russian drug dealers had stolen his laptop that may have contained "sensitive information" after they partied with him in Las Vegas back in 2018.

The video in question — reportedly filmed via his laptop — showed the 51-year-old after a sexual encounter with the woman. Throughout the video, Biden rehashes an alleged drug fueled period of time spent with the Russian dealers. The lawyer said that he "was with these guys. The one guy was, not like you anyway… each night he'd be like 'there's going to be so many people here, crazy f***ing party' and each night it's nobody."

. . . President Joe Biden's son detailed the night that he believes his computer was taken stating, "I went out to the hot tub by myself, which hangs over the edge of the f***ing top floor, with glass, it's ridiculous. And so I'm sitting there and that's the last I remember. And I don't ever pass out, ever. I wake up and the only people that are there are Miguel, the guy frantically running round gathering things up, ok – and Miguel, and Pierce, this guy, his friend."

. . . This is when, the father-of-five began to get suspicious about the location of his device. "I think he's the one that stole my computer. I think the three of them, the three guys that were like a little group. The dealer and his two guys, I took them everywhere. F***ing everywhere, crazy out of your mind sh**," the Yale alum claimed.

If this story is true -- at least, it comes from Hunter himself -- this is an entirely separate laptop, allegedly stolen in 2018 from a Las Vegas high-roller suite by shadowy cronies with Russian connections. This isn't the same laptop as the one Hunter left with the Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked up. At about 11:21 in the interview linked above, Kerr refers to this episode and says that at minimum, the last user-updated file on the Delaware laptop is from April 2019, so that at minimum, the Las Vegas laptop, if it exists, is not identical to the Delaware one, copies of which are currently in various hands.

At about 14:11, Kerr goes on to say that Hunter had a large number of Apple devices that were also linked to this laptop, and backups for which were kept on it, so that there are potentially many more data sources available on the laptop that haven't yet been explored.

There are several questions here that are so far unanswered. One is simply the enormous bills that Hunter ran up during that legendary 2018 cocaine bender. Kerr suggersts in the interview that Hunter was moving from one $10,000 a night suite to another in Las Vegas before he eventually wound up at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. We know very little about this -- where he was, whom he was with, and especially how much this all cost. Even given his salary as a director of Burisma and the baksheesh from China, I've got to think his expenses on that bender alone far exceeded his income. Who picked up all his tabs?

Second, we already know that Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, who is said to be funding Hunter's current lifestyle and has a team of 30 lawyers investigating the abandoned laptop, seems to be the go-to fixer at this point. Just what is he up to?

And as I've already asked, even a Hollywood lawyer can't afford to pay Hunter's various tabs, bail him out of his multimillion-dollar tax problems, and hire 30 other lawyers to look into the laptop. Who's really behind this? We might hear more after the election, at least.

So, Who's In Charge At The White House?

I'm back to my theories on what's actually going on in President Brandon's brain. As I've been saying for some time, I don't think it's senility or dementia; his thinking strikes me as purpose-driven, however obscure that purpose may be. Among the recent headlines saying he's surpassed modern records for presidential vacation days, I see most recently that the Brandons are returning to the beach this weekend:

For the second time this month, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will be spending the weekend at their North Shores beach home. The couple was in town the first weekend of June to celebrate Jill’s birthday, which was June 3, and this weekend is Father’s Day.

According to the White House’s Daily Guidance and Press Schedule issued June 16, the presidential couple are leaving Washington, D.C., at 11 a.m., Friday, June 17, and are expected to arrive in the Rehoboth area by 11:55 a.m. The guidance doesn’t say when the Bidens will be leaving the area; it just says they’ll be in town through the weekend. However, the Federal Aviation Administration has issued a restricted flight-area notice that lasts until 7:15 p.m., Monday, June 20.

I submit that if the president's thought processes are organized and purpose-oriented, then here we see a good part of his purpose, which we might characterize as "avoiding work". Haven't we all known people like that? Think about Wally in the Dilbert comic, then relate him to the real-world equivalents in our own careers. Don't we see those people in Joe? Let's see how this breaks out in the policy sphere. Take a recent report from Politico:

For more than a year, Democratic lawmakers and like-minded advocates have pleaded with Joe Biden to create a “gun czar” to address the epidemic of violence.

Each time, the president’s team pushed back with force, contending it has the perfect person already in place, someone with command over the issue and extraordinary access to the president himself.

That person is Susan Rice.

. . . Her ascendence to the role of point person on guns marks the latest chunk of policy turf over which she has claimed jurisdiction, joining a sprawling portfolio that stretches from policing and racial justice to student loan debt, immigration and health care policy, including a prime piece of protecting abortion rights.

The scope of her fiefdom is as remarkable as how she managed to secure it. Having eschewed a public-facing role, Rice has relied on a combination of internal maneuvering and bureaucratic know-how to place herself at the nerve center of some of the fiercest debates roiling Washington. And she’s further cemented her status with the president in the process.

Wait a moment. Isn't Ron Klain still chief of staff? But the story doesn't mention him until farther down:

Rice’s elevated stature in the West Wing has come with fierce loyalty from colleagues and praise so superlative-laden that it borders on deification. More recently, it has led to speculation inside the White House that she will succeed Ron Klain should he leave the chief of staff post.

I think there's a subtext here. Ron Klain was supposed to be in charge -- look at this puff piece from February 2021 in CNN:

Unusually visible, involved in practically everything, and free in sharing his opinions on what has become the new administration's must-follow Twitter feed, White House chief of staff Ron Klain has emerged as the building's most central figure aside from the President himself.

His combination of deep Washington experience and long professional ties to President Joe Biden have rendered Klain one of the most powerful chiefs of staff in history, officials and those close to the White House said, one uniquely positioned to confront the parallel crises facing the nation while also channeling a President he understands implicitly.

Except now Klain is on his way out, and Politico is trying to figure out who really runs the show. The odd thing is that both the CNN and Politico stories pump first Klain and now Rice, but a couple paragraphs farther down, they discount the influence of both. For instance, in Politico:

To some former colleagues and outside advocates, Rice has come to personify a kind of risk-averse, incremental approach to policy-making that they fear falls far short of addressing the country’s needs — and will ill-serve Democrats in the midterms and elections beyond.

“Rice is seen as a domestic policy lightweight and a block to any good things that happen to cross her desk,” said the leader of one progressive organization, who asked to withhold their name out of fear of angering Rice and the White House. “So everybody who wants to do big things has a vested interest in her desk being as empty as possible.”

If that's the case, then why is Biden so closely identified with two highly controversial policies, first, the abolition of fossil fuels, and second, pansexualism, including bringing transsexuals into the mainstream, having men compete in women's sports, and radical abortionism? He's been very clear for months now that rising fuel prices aren't his fault, but they're fine anyhow, because they'll make everyone buy electric cars? Or the latest leak that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, he'll declare a national health emergency?

I think the reality here is that he isn't listening to anybody, at least nobody in a conventional political job, although the agenda he most frequently expresses is much closer to Klain than Rice. But if Klain is out and Rice is in, why isn't he backing away from killing fossil fuels or supporting transgenders on the Day of Visibility? But these positions are nevertheless neither delusional nor hallucinatory. They're this-wordly and oddly consistent with some arcane purpose, whatever that may be.

His son Hunter, of course, claims Dad listens to him. That may be more credible than theories about either Ron Klain or Susan Rice. I'm inclined to see both Hunter's advice and an overriding desire to avoid any kind of real work as better explanations for the big guy's approach to the office.

Given The Perspective Of Yesterday's Post, Where Does Russia Stand?

What intrigues me about the Russia-Ukraine War is how it's first sent me to look at early modern history in Poland, the Baltic region, and Ukraine. But the map above is from Wikipedia and shows the Swedish Empire at its greatest extent about 1720, when the rise of Russia changed alignments. Here's the Wikipedia summary:

The Swedish Empire was a European great power that exercised territorial control over much of the Baltic region during the 17th and early 18th centuries (Swedish: Stormaktstiden, "the Era of Great Power"). The beginning of the empire is usually taken as the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, who ascended the throne in 1611, and its end as the loss of territories in 1721 following the Great Northern War.

. . . After the victories in the Thirty Years' War, Sweden reached the climax of the great-power era during the Second Northern War, when its primary adversary, Denmark–Norway, was neutralized by the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 (this is when the Swedish empire was at its largest extent). However, in the further course of this war, as well as in the subsequent Scanian War, Sweden was able to maintain its empire only with the support of its closest ally, France. Charles XI of Sweden consolidated the empire. But a decline began with his son, Charles XII. After initial Swedish victories, Charles secured the empire for some time in the Peace of Travendal (1700) and the Treaty of Altranstädt (1706), before the disaster that followed the king's war in Russia. The Russian victory at the Battle of Poltava put an end to Sweden's eastbound expansion, and by the time of Charles XII's death in 1718 only a much-weakened and far smaller territory remained. The last traces of occupied continental territory vanished during the Napoleonic Wars, and Finland went to Russia in 1809, with Sweden's role as a great power vanishing as well.

Sweden is the only Nordic country to have ever reached the status of a military great power.

If you overlay the map above with a map of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

you wind up with the approximate area that Russia now regards as in dispute -- militarily, it's attempting to regain control of Ukraine, but Putin has been making largely idle threats against what is effectively the full incorporation of the former Swedish Empire into NATO. Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion has applied to join the EU, would like to join NATO, but in the meantime has been concluding separate economic and defense agreements with Poland and the Baltics that look a lot like the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

All these maps in turn remind me of the map I posted Wednesday of a projected 2050 Baltic economic zone. Why is that map in particular even possible? I think it represents a return to economic and military conditions that prevailed before the rise of Russia as a modern state, especially before the late 1600s. This suggests to me that Poland, Sweden, and Finland are seizing the opportunity to expand their effective sovereignty under the NATO military umbrella, with Ukraine as a surrogate and with the endorsement of the EU.

Think about the current rhetorical meaning of the phrase "start World War III". It's been current throughout my lifetime, but actuallly most frequently in a corporate context -- "If you say that about Accounting, you'll start World War III." When we heard that in the 1970s, after Russia invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia with impunity, it was with the understanding that offending the Soviet Union was so unthinkable that it was comparable to bringing down the full authority of the CEO and the Board of Directors [i.e. the Almighty Himself] on one's own little department.

In contrast, by 2022, we have the US president quibbling with his secretaries of state and defense over the wording of highly provocative military threats against Russia, with the president complaining that if they're too strong, they'll start World War III. Except that we already know that as of 2022, the only actual result of such provocations has been to make Putin issue increasingly impotent threats. The strategic problem for the Soviet successor state is that it mustered nearly its full effective military strength against a third-rate power, which fought it to a standstill. Had it invaded even Poland, it's understood the result for Russia would have been clear disaster.

As a result, the most favorable realistic outcome for Russia given the current state of the war will be a cease-fire along roughly current battle lines, which would amount to a fairly minor extension of the borders following its 2014 invasion of Ukraine. It will not stop or negate the already enhanced alliances with the UK, Poland, and the Baltics. It would not prevent the admission of remaining Ukraine to the EU. But whether or not that even happens, the EU foreign and economic policy of integrating Ukraine will continue.

A negotiated settlement leaving Crimea, Donbas, and Mariupol out of Ukraine would not integrate these industrial areas into European economy, but Ukrainian grain and other industrial output would ship increasingly via Europe. This srikes me as a long-term trend, of which the current Ukraine conflict, and even the 2014 invasion, is just a symptom -- Russia is in a long-term decline that brings that part of Europe back to the 1600s.