In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The photo above is an illustration of the type of body cameras worn by officers of the San Francisco Police Department. In current technology, police body cameras activate automatically, often when officers exit their police vehicles. They can't be turned off. I'll get to this below. One thing you learned as a fan of Live PD , which following its cancellation by A&E has been cloned and resuscitated as OP Live by the REELZ network, is that police departments that allow camera crews to ride along inevitably assign the crews to their best officers. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn't, since bungled arrests, episodes of brutality, or community relations disasters would all be caught on tape, while conversely, it's to their credit to have a courteous, diverse, effective patrol force on full public display. My wife and I have watched these shows long enough, since some of the departments have participated in them over many seasons, to see som...

As of this morning, the lid looks to be well and truly down on the Paul Pelosi home invasion-hammer attack story. This must surely be the case if the first call he placed after his DUI accident last May was to the family fixer, after which we heard nothing that wasn't thoroughly massaged, cleaned, and spun. But never fear, J Edgar's here. That means we can be pretty sure we've learned all we're ever going to hear, despite the truly hinky narrative that trickled out Friday and Saturday. Recognizing that we're dealing with something like the fog of war here, with garbled and incomplete reports based on misunderstandings, the story that's initally emerged just doesn't add up, start to finish. Here's what's implied about the start: Suspect David DePape, 42, had broken into the home in the wee hours of Friday morning, demanding to see the powerful lawmaker, who was out of town, according to police. I think if we were more careful, though, the...

One of yesterday's stories caught my eye , but not for the reason it was reported. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Thursday was caught on a hot mic saying Democrats are “going downhill” in Georgia. Schumer was speaking in a huddle with President Biden on the tarmac about the midterm elections ahead of the president’s trip to New York. “The state where we’re going downhill is Georgia,” Schumer told Biden. “It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker.” Republican commentators found this delicious, since it's an indication of where the November elections are headed. But the whole vignette raises a different question for me. We must assume Sen Schumer is referring to internal Democrat polling, which is generally thought to be more reliable, in part because it's paid for and thus more expensive than the free stuff you get from the media. But information has value. Valuable information is protected the same way we protect valuable mercha...

In yesterday's post, I mentioned the puzzle of the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition, in which the rail magnate Edward Harriman sponsored a major scientific investigation of Alaska's coast. Nobody has so far been able to explain just why he did this -- the suggestion in yesterday's Wikipedia link was that his doctor said he needed a break. But Alice Roosevelt Longworth is said to have described Harriman as "a little brown man who never seemed to play", so it would be in character for him to turn for what others might seem to be a vacation into just an opportunity for a different sort of work. Pierpont Morgan, a contemporary of Harriman and an equivalent figure, took an interest in Alaska at roughly the same time. The Kennicott [correct original spelling] copper deposit was discovered in July 1899, and by 1906, in response to the copper discovery as well as coal deposits not far away in south central Alaska, the "Alaska Syndicate," was formed in ...

If you do a web search on any phrase like "map of Russia in 2050" or something similar, you can find dozens of fanciful maps of how former Russian territory might be divided following the collapse of the Putin state. I've posted a few here now and then, and here's another one today. But so far, I've seen very little serious discussion of what any such outcome might actually be, even though every indication is that Russian military capability was wildly overestimated before the current war, while Russia's stockpile of obsolescent weapons and its available military manpower have now been seriously depleted. In other words, the actual balance of world power is shifting big time as we watch. I've run into are a few early glimmers of analysis. In Foreign Policy yesterday : For the first time, Iran is involved in a major war on the European continent. Iranian military advisors, most likely members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are on the g...

The overwhelming news this morning was Pennsylvania US Senate candidate John Fetterman's distressing performance in last night's debate with Dr Oz, starting with his opening statement, "Hi, goodnight everybody!" The conventional wisdom discussed his medical condition, although nobody has yet asked how a clearly robust 53-year-old man could suffer a stroke and what that might mean (I wouldn't rule out white powder). But leaving that aside, what we heard was word salad, whatever its cause. In his case, for instance, My doctors, the real doctors that I believe, they all believe that I am ready to be served, or, I absolutely support fracking. . . . I do support fracking and — I don’t, I don’t, I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking. But how does this differ from Vice President Harris? For instance, We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and ...

I think we're seeing a puzzling phenomenon, which appears to be a schism within the lizard people. If I apply the sort of populist sociopolitical analysis pioneered by Ferdinand Lundberg and C Wright Mills, the best-credentialed member of the power elite currently in Washington is Secretary of State Antony Blinken, member of a wealthy and powerful upper-class family that's had political influence for at least two generations, but possibly more. His close ally is Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin , with whom he has been and continues to be a partner in Pine Island Capital Partners , a "strategic partner" of Blinken's WestExec, a geopolitical consulting firm "comparable to Kissinger Associates". Although Austin initially implemented predictable Biden policies like enforcing COVID measures in the armed forces and discouraging "extremist" views among members, since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, his near-exclusive focus has been managing US militar...

Via the Washington Examiner, President Joe Biden made good on his promise to host TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney at the White House Thursday. "I get to sit down with Joe Biden with Now This News, and I get to ask him a few questions surrounding trans issues in the United States," Mulvaney said in a TikTok marking the 222nd day of Mulvaney's gender transition. Mulvaney, a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, said the purpose behind the interview was to represent the transgender community and wore the transgender flag colors, white, blue, and pink, to honor the community. . . . The interview is set to air on Sunday. The odd thing is Mulvaney's utter lack of gravitas (photo above). According to the web, Mulvaney is well-known for chronicling her firsts as a woman in the “Days of Girlhood” series. In the meantime, Mulvaney stated in the podcast of the cosmetics company Ulta, “The Beauty of…” with gender fluid celebrity hairstylist David Lopez...

Via CBS News : The U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division has been deployed to Europe for the first time in almost 80 years amid soaring tension between Russia and the American-led NATO military alliance. The light infantry unit, nicknamed the "Screaming Eagles," is trained to deploy on any battlefield in the world within hours, ready to fight. CBS News joined the division's Deputy Commander, Brigadier General John Lubas, and Colonel Edwin Matthaidess, Commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, on a Black Hawk helicopter for the hour-long ride to the very edge of NATO territory — only around three miles from Romania's border with Ukraine. . . . Skirting northward along Romania's Black Sea coast, the Black Hawk eventually touched down at a forward operating site where U.S. and Romanian troops were pounding targets during a joint ground and air assault exercise. The tank rounds and artillery fire were real. The drill was meant to recreate the battles Ukrai...

Scary clip BIDEN: "It's my intention to run again." MSNBC: "Dr. Biden is for it?" BIDEN: crickets MSNBC: "Mr. President?" BIDEN: "Dr. Biden thinks that uh, my wife thinks that uh, that I uh, that, that we're, that we're doing something very important." pic.twitter.com/lPVyEi2kv3 — Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 21, 2022 When I think back on my corporate career, I remember case after case where the Senior VP, or whatever the big boss's title was, had been told he was no longer needed. At that level, they were never escorted out the door, but it was plain they had only weeks remaining. Still, they were allowed to keep up appearances until the end. But you could read the signs. They didn't show up at the planning meeting for next fiscal year, for instance. Rhetorically, President Brandon's remarks in the interview linked above give the game away: "It's my intention to run again." Not "Don't be s...

As I suggested yesterday, the world globalist consensus doesn't know quite what to do with President Zelensky. Leading up to February 24, the conventional wisdom across the board was that Russia would reach Kyiv within days, and the humane option was to offer Zelensky and his circle rides out on C-130s. When he refused to do this, it took policymakers by surprise and created an instant bien pensant consensus in favor of Ukraine, without a whole lot of reflection on what this might imply. Witness just this tweet from last night: At fundraiser tonight, @POTUS blasted GOP for potentially scaling down aid to Ukraine. “It's a lot bigger than Ukraine. It's Eastern Europe. It's NATO. It's real serious, serious consequential outcomes. They have no sense of American foreign policy." — Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) October 20, 2022 But wait, up to late February, American foreign policy was to offer Zelensky a ride out , wasn't it? The Associated Press reported ...

I've seen some intriguing data points over the past day that are giving me some ideas about what the people who really run the show are thinking. First, the US State Department, Antony Blinken ( net worth $65 million , although the Blinken family controls far more), Secretary, has had to spank President Brandon yet again for un-vetted remarks: Biden made the offending comments at a Democrat Party event at a private home in California last week. Offering disorganized remarks commenting on nuclear weapons generally, Biden mentioned Pakistan amid boasting yet again that he has a close personal relationship with dictator Xi Jinping of China. . . . “This is a guy [Xi] who understands what he wants but has an enormous, enormous array of problems. How do we handle that?” the president asked. “How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.” . . . Fo...

I had one of those nights last night when I woke up with the feeling I hadn't fully figured something out. It clearly stemmed from Francis Fukuyama's Atlantic essay that I linked yesterday . I would summarize it via the following excerpts. First, [Russia and China] were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador. But we mustn't lose heart. Indeed, The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. . . . When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with ["the end of history"] in the title, I noted that the Marxist v...

In a piece at The Atlantic, More Proof That This Really Is the End of History , Francis Fukuyama doubles down: The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. But why should there be only two alternatives, Hegel-Fukuyama and Marxism? When I first posted about Mr Fukuyama here , I suggested that Osama bin Laden needed to hear that message but clearly didn't. And although Marxism has reverted to the parlor and the faculty lounge where it had been before 1917, this hasn't cured the problem of bi...

Just for fun, I did a google search this morning on "Biden sniffing hair" to see if anyone had anything intelligent to say about last weekend's episodes, and the messages above came up -- "It looks like the results below are changing quickly". This is actually the first I've ever seen this message on a search, which suggests more people than usual are looking it up -- but nobody has anything new to say about it. However, this tweet from last July suggests it's been going on steadily in the background and has never really stopped, despite the big guy's 2019 promise to abstain: Dad ran into Joe on a biking trail in Delaware and got a live sniffing video lmfao pic.twitter.com/qz9KuEzN9E — martman (@big__marty) July 10, 2022 This raises a question of etiquette if nothing else. A year ago, Brandon caused a minor stir when he put his hand on Prince William's shoulder during a visit to the UK. One does not touch the royals. Indeed, I assume th...