I'm Not Sure If We're Looking At The Same Church

I note another blog post from Fr Longenecker today, Quo Vadis Traditionalists?, in which he discusses options that might be open to traditionalists who may be frustrated by recent restrictions on the Latin mass. On one hand, I'm not sure of his definition of "traditionalist", and in that light, he's been clear to say he isn't one, which separates him from someone like Fr Zuhlsdorf. But Bp Barron also calls himself a "traditionalist" if by "tradition" one means "adherence to the Church's ecumenical councils, incluiding the Second Vatican Council".

Fr Longenecker proposes avenues for Catholics who disagree with restrictions on the Latin mass:

[W]hat will be the response of those Catholics who are devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass given Rome’s latest round of restrictions? Several things: Some will migrate to the SSPX. Others will seek out other forms of reverent, traditional Catholic worship– an Ordinariate parish, a Byzantine parish or a Novus Ordo that is celebrated in a traditional manner. Others, who are more hard line, will practice subversive obedience. “We can’t have the Latin Mass in the parish church? OK. We’ll move it to the parish fellowship hall, the gym or the Rectory chapel. In fact, what we’re doing is raising the money to build a Latin Mass chapel on the church campus. We’ll worship there instead of the parish church.”

He puts this in a somewhat peculiar context:

What complicates this problem even further–and something which the Englishman [Cardinal] Roche doesn’t seem to understand at all is the entrepreneurial spirit of American conservative Catholicism.

Having been a close observer of the first ten years of an "entrepreneurial" option among those he lists, the North American ordinariate, I've got to say that the reality on the ground isn't what Fr Longenecker suggests it might be. He suggests conservative Catholics might raise money for their own projects, and indeed, that's what we've seen over and over in the ordinariate, with results that have been at best disappointing, but also in some cases like the St Barnabas Omaha ordinariate parish, flagrantly mismanaged. There, its pastor was removed for out-of-control spending that resulted in the need to sell off parish property, but a new administrator has since been faced with continuing divisive issues within the parish. As a visitor put it to me in an e-mail,

To me, those who give their typical diocesan parish a failing grade and then try to get an Ordinariate parish going are like parents who give up on the local school system and try to get a charter school going, or a private alternative . This may benefit the small number who attend, but does nothing to improve local education generally. Perhaps the issue of personal responsibility in the area of education s a political one, but in the case of the Church I think it is moral. Establishing a little enclave of "people like us" is the exact opposite of evangelisation. The financial saga of St Barnabas, Omaha is a depressing example of how “privatisation” is fundamentally the wrong approach, IMHO.

Beyond that, I've got to say that in my case, a thwarted attempt to enter the Church via a parish that failed to join the ordinariate forced me, kicking and screaming, to discover how reverent and worthwhile a diocesan parish can be. What's continued to fascinate me is that the St John's Seminary of the Los Angeles archdiocese, which has been a conspicuous target of conservative agitators who don't live here, continues to provide a steady supply of remarkable priests. Some of them rotate through our parish, either as residents while in seminary or associates after ordination, and then go on to other parishes throughout the archdiocese. What strikes me is that these priests set an example that makes me think the Catholic priesthood has actually become a viable career option for capable, healthy men seeking a worthwhile use of their talents.

Their standard of education, communication, pastoral leadeership, and management style is uniformly high. It's also plain that the level of support and the level of expectation from the archdiocese are both just as high. Our parish programs also involve parishioners from other parishes in the area, and the sense I have is that the level of pastoral care isn't unique to our own parish. Nobody I've gotten to know is disgruntled, and certainly not to the point that anyone is proposing a campaign to build aomething like a Latin mass chapel.

Fr Longenecker deosn't mention what I think are two much more significant "entrepreneurial" phenomena, Ascension Presents and Bp Barron's Word on Fire. Ascension has sponsored two widely available series on YouTube and elsewhere, Bible in a Year and now Catechism in a Year. I'm following the Catechism in a Year, which at the moment has about 110,000 subscribers on YouTube. This is the 1992 St John Paul II Catechism, which is explicitly based on the Second Council.

Word on Fire is, among other things, a high-quality publishing outlet; last year it published an edition of the Second Council documents with commentary by Bp Barron. I bought this and read it. I can only agree with Bp Barron that if people have a problem with the Council, they at least ought to read its documents and commentary. But Word on Fire publishes a great deal else.

One big point I'm taking away from the Catechism in a Year is that salvation is corporate and takes place in the context of the Church. I'm not at all sure that it solves anything to suggest that people set up little enclaves of the like-minded, especially when the US Church is currently displaying remarkable energy. I'm back to the question I used to ask on my old blog, "What problem are we trying to solve?" What problem, for instance, is the North American ordinariate trying to solve if it's attracted so few disaffected Episcopalians after ten years? After all, even Fr Longenecker acknowledges that the point of ordinariates was to allow Anglicsns to preserve their traditions and liturgy in a Catholic context, but now he's suggesting they're actually for disgruntled Catholics.

And of course, we've got to acknowledge that fairly soon after its founding, the US ordinariate extended its target market to Methodists and AME. Isn't it worth asking why this was done and why, in light of a Methodist schism even bigger than the "continuing" movement for Episcopalians, not a single Methodist parish has shown an interest? Instead, the ordinariate is being proposed as a boutique option for Catholics to practice what Fr Longenecker recommends as “subversive obedience”. I'm scratching my head.

Anglicanorum Coetibus And Conservative Wishful Thinking

I've already posted here about the schism dividing the United Methodist Church over same-sex marriage and the fact that Methodists are already fully eligible to enter the Roman Catholic Church as intact parishes with their clergy under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus. This is, at least in theory, an option available to the thousands of UMC parishes that are investigating disaffiliation and joining a more conservative denomination. However, I concluded in that post that this isn't what William James would call a "living option":

[L]et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

For whatever reason, we must conclude that for United Methodists, 7.6 million in 20l0 in the US, a number closely approaching zero has elected to enter the Roman Catholic Church via Anglicanorum coetibus even as individuals since the erection of the North American ordinariate in 2012. As far as anyone is aware, no United Methodist parish has ever attempted to join, or even inquired about joining, the North American ordinariate. Thus in William James's terms, we must come to the conclusion that for any UMC parish determined to disaffiliate, although it is canonically and legally possible, the option "continue as a corporate body affiliated with the UMC or affiliate with the Roman Catholic Church via the North American ordinariate" is not living -- neither is it forced, and neither is it momentous.

This, of course, does not cover the entirely separate option of individual United Methodists, or for that matter baptized Protestants of any other denomination, to enter the Roman Catholic Church via RCIA or other catechetical process -- and many thousands do this each year. For all of them, this is a living option. It's just the ordinariate option that isn't living.

I may be completely unique among commentators in having made the observation that it's even possible for a UMC parish to elect to join an ordinariate. I'm not aware, for instance, of any wave of anticipation at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society that any UMC parish will elect to do this, much less dozens or hundreds. And I'm not aware of anyone asking why this might not be the case. (I'll leave any attempt to answer that myself for another post.)

What does intrigue me is a blog post by Fr Dwight Longenecker, Will the Church of England Split? Fr Longenecker is a Roman Catholic priest, married with a family, who was raised a devout Evangelical but was attracted to Anglicanism, went to seminary in Oxford, and was ordained and served as a priest in the Church of England in the UK. He left the CofE in the wake of its decision to ordain women in 1994. At that time, the Roman Catholic Church created a provision for ordination of married former CofE priests, but its implementation was uneven, and Fr Longenecker's ordination was stalled until the US Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina was able to ordain him via an obscure provision dating from Pius XII and return him to the US as a married priest in his jurisdiction.

Thus Fr Longenercker is in a situation completely outside either the Pastoral Provision or the ordinariates, a married former Anglican Catholic priest who serves in an ordinary diocesan parish. My impression is that although he is somewhat conservative theologically, he isn't closely aligned with traditionalists, though he often expresses sympathy for them. But it seems to me that, as a former priest in the Church of England, his views on a potential split there are naive:

[T]he answer to those in the Church of England who are troubled is close at hand. The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was established to help Anglicans who treasure their traditions and patrimony to retain their customs and culture while also being re-united into full communion with the Catholic Church. I had mentioned that it was mostly the Evangelicals in the Church of England who were upset. Would Evangelicals be welcome in the Ordinariate or is it only for disaffected Anglo-Catholics? You must ask those who are already in the Ordinariate, but in my opinion there is no reason why good, orthodox Evangelicals should not be able to find a home in the Ordinariate and bring into the Ordinariate the strengths of their own Evangelical-Anglican heritage. No doubt they would have to make some adjustments to some of their theological opinions, but that could be a strong growing point and their Evangelical zeal, their entrepreneurial spirit and their love of Scripture and emphasis on personal conversion would all help to strengthen–not weaken the Ordinariate.

. . . Membership of the Ordinariate solves the problem of Anglican fissiparousness not through further division, but by unity with Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Catholics are supposed to be talking at this time about “enlarging the tent” of the church. The Anglican Ordinariate does just that.

In part, his view is understandable, becahse he's not just a former Anglican, but he's also a former Evangelical, but his own road to Catholicism, via Oxford and Anglo-Catholicism, was idiosyncratic. People who haven't traveled that particular path, which involved the need to resolve not one but several spiritual options in sequence that were living, forced, and momentous, will see a single option, "remain a low-church Anglican despite my discomfort, or become a newbie Catholic despite my even greater discomfort", as neither living, forced, nor momentous.

The actual state of the ordinariates as they currently exist isn't an encouraging factor, either. In general, conservatives tend to see the ordinariates as a good idea for everyone else, just like conservatives often see military service as a good thing for people in general, just not for themselves. Clearly Fr Longenecker never seriously considered reincardination into the North American ordinariate for himself, for instance; there were never, and still aren't, realistic full-time career opportunites in his part of the country (and indeed nearly anywhere else).

Despite a couple of well-publcized conversions of Church of England bishops to Catholicism and joining the UK ordinariate after retirement, no ordinariate parishes there own any property, and at best, membership numbers are stagnant. Someone -- significantly, no one currently active in the UK ordinariate -- is available to undertake the task Fr Lengenecker proposes of evangelizing low-church Anglicans and overcoming their instinctive distrust of Catholicism, when the predominant strain within all the ordinariates tends toward a somewhat dilettantish boutique Anglican Papalism.

Unfortunately, to comment on Fr Longenecker'ss blog, you have to be a registered financial donor, and our charitable budget is dominated by the need to support causes much closer to home. Otherwise, I wish I could have engaged Fr Longenecker more closely in this discussion by commenting directly on his blog. If anyone is in a position to make Fr Longenecker aware of this post, I'd welcome the opportunity to hear his views.

Remember The Hospital Ships?

During March 2020, the hospital ship Comfort was ordered to New York, and the Mercy was ordered to Los Angeles as part of the federal government's initial response to the COVID pandemic. On March 16 of that year, President Trump declared a national emergency, and under the theme "15 days to slow the spread", he endorsed the quasi-national lockdowns ordered by state and local health departments, which famously lasted much longer than 15 days. The moral panic took firm hold, although within a fairly short time, the public was made aware that the model under which the lockdowns were ordered and the hospital ships dispatched was "so highly flawed it never should have been relied upon for policy decisions to begin with."

As the "morning after" phase of the panic slowly dawns, we're gradually learning details of how the authorities tried to cover up the consequences of their initial policy errors. Yesterday's New York Post carries this story:

A US Navy admiral begged the Cuomo administration to send patients to the nearly-empty hospital ship docked on the Hudson River during the height of the pandemic — but his pleas were met with politics and paranoia, The Post has learned.

. . . Another federal facility was set up in the Jacob Javits Center in midtown. Both famously sat mostly empty during their time of operation — with city, state and federal officials blaming each other for the issue at the time.

But in a trove of recently unearthed government emails obtained by activist Peter Arbeeny and provided to The Post, a frustrated Vice Admiral Mike Dumont urged the Cuomo administration to act.

The problem was that in fact, there weren't enough COVID patients to go around, because the Imperial College London model of the pandemic wildly overpredicted the number who would be hospitalized. This was the reason Trump, on the recommendations of his COVID advisers, dispatched the hospital ships in the first place.

“We could use some help from your office,” [Adm Dumont] wrote in an April 7, 2020 missive to Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa. “The Governor asked us to permit use of USNS COMFORT to treat patients without regard to their COVID status and we have done so. Right now we only have 37 patients aboard the ship. Further, we are treating only 83 patients at the Javits Events Center.

. . . The Comfort arrived to much fanfare in New York City on March 30, 2020. New infections were spreading out of control, hospitals were overflowing with patients, and supplies were so short, first responders were reduced to wearing garbage bags.

I think it would be more accurate to say media was reporting new infections out of control, hospitals overflowing with patients, and short supplies. For instance, in early May 2020, there was a frenzy of reporting that the City of New York was forced to store bodies in refrigerated trucks, but a year later, the trucks and bodies were still there, not because the morgues were overwhelmed, but because the city had lost touch with relatives to get instructions on their disposition. By mid-May, it was plain that sending both the Comfort and the Mercy to New York and Los Angeles had been unnecessary from the start:

Though Mercy arrived in Los Angeles – and sister ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) arrived in New York City – amid concerns that local hospital systems would be overwhelmed with COVID cases and need additional capacity to support the high patient load, that need to lean on the hospital ship never materialized. LA-area hospitals ultimately only sent 77 patients to the ship over six weeks. The Mercy MTF performed 36 successful general, orthopedic and plastic surgeries, as well as interventional radiology, exploratory laparotomy and skin grafting procedures.

Even if there was finger-pointing in New York over how few patients wound up in the Javits Center and the Comfort, the situation in Los Angeles with the Mercy was exactly the same. Even so, local politicians continued to try to stoke panic with each renewed COVID surge:

A Los Angeles County supervisor is appealing to California’s governor to request a Navy hospital ship return to the city’s port to help hospitals battling COVID-19.

In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA County’s fourth district Supervisor Janice Hahn said hospitals in Los Angeles are reaching a “breaking point” due to the amount of coronavirus cases and asked Newsom to request hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) come to the city’s port.

. . . The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hahn’s request.

The House Republicans intend to hold some type of investigation into the COVID panic, but I'm not sure if we'll ever get a clear picture of what actually took place. For now, it seems plain that the Navy quickly determined that sending the hospital ships was an epic fiasco, but it kept the matter quiet, and its medical staff doesn't seem to have been anxious to insert itself into any higher-level policy discussion. Admiral Dumont, who seems to have had some part in this belated revelation, waited until he'd been retired for more than a year.

Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In 't

Has anyone else noticed that recently, every time John Kirby appears at a White House press conference, Karine Jean-Pierre stands at his shoulder? This appears to date from a kerfuffle last September, when according to the New York Post,

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was left stunned Friday when a reporter asked if his frequent briefing room appearances meant that he was the “second press secretary” and undermining Karine Jean-Pierre, the first woman of color to be chief White House spokesperson.

The head-turning inquiry came from Cameroonian journalist Simon Ateba — who was selected by Jean-Pierre to ask Kirby a question, despite previously sparring with Kirby on a similar topic.

Note that according to the Post, the moment was scripted.

“The reason I’m asking is because almost everywhere I go, I have black people telling me that the reason you’re at the White House is to undermine the first female black [press] secretary,” added Ateba, of Today News Africa.

. . . “If anyone gets any kind of idea in their head that I’m taking away from Karine or her work that’s really regrettable,” Kirby responded to Ateba.

“And I’m very sorry that that’s any impression that anybody would have. I am simply working at the National Security Council on national security communications — and with her good graces, I’m able to come up here every now and then to talk to you about simply national security issues,” Kirby continued.

Kirby's response sounds as if it was pretty tightly scripted too, and almost immediately, we began to see a lot less of Adm Kirby (checking Wikipedia, his naval career and rise to rear admiral was entirely via positions as a public affairs officer, so I don't feel all that sorry for the guy -- he basically just looked good in an admiral's suit.)

In the photo above, where they let him out again on a very short leash to address the UFO ballons, he looks tired and unhappy. In the wake of revelations that the UFO balloons were student science projects and hobby exercises by middle-aged white guys, his job was to obscure that:

[T]he Biden administration is still assessing the three unknown objects, and White House National Security Council Director of Strategic Communications John Kirby said Friday they might never know what the objects were.

"I can’t sit here and promise you that we will get to that level of fidelity and detail," Kirby said, noting "a lot of it" would depend on when and how officials recover the objects.

Kirby said "it is going to be very difficult to find them" given the conditions of the locations where the objects were shot down, and said it would also be difficult to "do the forensics to identify" them.

"I can’t promise you that we’ll know definitively, one way or the other," Kirby said.

Well, that's because the balloons are about 36 inches in diameter, their payloads are nothing but small circuit boards, and the half-million dollar missiles that shot them down basically reduced everything to a little cloud of corn flakes, if that. Any effort at recovery was pure kabuki. The Mounties seem to have been the first to get real about this, likely because Biden can't order them to do anything more:

“After conducting an extensive search in the Lake Huron area with the assistance of the Canadian Coast Guard and other domestic and international partners, a decision was reached to suspend the search due to several factors including deteriorating weather and the low probability of recovery,” the RCMP said.

I had a boss once who, in response to some corporate ukase, came up to me with it and said, "Were you ever in the military? If you were, you know about bullsh*t. Well, this is bullsh*t." Somehow I think Adm Kirby's expression in the photo above reflects this, but again, he's made his own bed here. So he's going to say nothing to contradict the author of last Sunday's bullsh*t, presumably out of professional courtesy:

The U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to U.S. intelligence experts.

Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: "I'll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven't ruled out anything."

But they did feel the need to put Adm Kirby out for something.

Karine Jean-Pierre says the U.S. military shot an object over Canada "because it's part of NORAD. There's, uh, the NORAD is part of like a, part of a—it's a, it's a, what you call, a coalition, a consortium."

"We did it clearly in step with CANADIA." pic.twitter.com/X1CmWnR2ns

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 12, 2023

He wasn't out there to explain anything at all, he was just there to fill in time without the risk that Ms Jean-Pierre would embarrass herself yet further. I'm sure that's yet another factor in the admiral's facial expression.

Here's my current theory. Somehow in the general panicked muddle at the White House as members of Biden's own party criticized his non-response to the Chinese spy balloon, somebody brought up the hundreds of hobbyist pico balloons traversing the country at any given time. Whoever brought it up hadn't thought it through all that clearly, but may well have made the point that we don't shoot those down, do we? And Trump did nothing about those, either! He knew all about them and did nothing!

President Brandon seized on that point. Probably without understanding the underlying issue very well at all, he decided on a show of strength, not only was he going to shoot down the big Chinese ballon, he was going to take a hard line on all those little balloons that Trump did nothing about. I'll bet that everyone in the room, from the national security director on down, knew exactly what those little balloons were, and so did the F-22 and F-16 pilots who were ordered to shoot them down. (They could be court martialed for giving their real opinions.) For that matter, so did the Mounties tasked with making a token search for the debris, but at least they could quickly but politely bow out. Every last one of them knew it was bullsh*t.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines spoke briefly on the suspected Chinese spy balloon controversy during an appearance at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Haines, who oversees the U.S. intelligence community, remarked on how “crazy” the situation has become in the past couple weeks.

“It’s so crazy. It’s really like an episode of ‘Veep,’ you know, on some level,” she quipped, referring to the HBO political satire show that starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

It's crazy because nobody at that level has any credibility. And that's because some kids working on scout projects and middle-aged white guy hobbyists have made monkeys out of them without even meaning to.

I briefly thought someone like Secretary Austin could fix the problem by making a good-humored offer of reimbursement for the balloons, but that leaves out the question of who'll pay for the $2 million worth of rockets that shot them down. The problem is beyond simple remedy, because it was micromanaged by the guy at the top. But this, yet once more, is not the product of dementia. This is Hunter's dad and Jill's husband. However wacky, there's method in it.

The Domestic Terrorists Behind The UFO Balloons

Via the New York Post, this is a photo of members of the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, which has at least provisionally claimed responsibility for the UFO brought down by an Air Force F-22 over Yukon Territory. (Grammatical side note: certain areas, notably Ukraine, are incorrectly paired with a "the". It's correct to refer to geographical areas that don't correspond to state entities with that designation, as "the Rockies", "the Caribbean", and so forth. However, to say "the Yukon" is incorrect, as it is a definite government entity, as is Ukraine. We don't say "the Arizona".)

Here's a thought experiment. The NIBBB has a website and appears to be an incorporated group with a bank account, among other things. What if the US Secretary of Defense were to have an aide contact the NIBBB and, purely as a public relations gesture, ask the NIBBB to tell him what their balloon cost and offer to reimburse them from the Secretary's personal funds? No need to write a personal check, just pay the amount to the Defense Department and have the DoD write the check.

In fact, it appears that the what the NIBBB calls pico ballooning has become a well-recognized sub-hobby of ham radio. The NIBBB says of itself,

We’re licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowing us to communicate to other Hams throughout the World. Pico meaning small, we send a small transmitter, with GPS tracking and antenna on a balloon filled with Hydrogen, rising to 47,000 feet, and travelling with the speed of the Jetstream. As we travel, our GPS is able to locate our current location, and other information is gathered depending on what chips we have on our transmitter while using other programs to gather other inflight information.

In other words, the NIBBB is only one of what appear to be many pico balloon hobby groups that operate under federal license, with the status and position of each balloon tracked and fully available to the public (and of course the military). Thus, of the three UFOs that were shot down by F-22 or F-16 and half-million-dollar missiles over the past week, they were each in fact fully identifiable as such at the time, with their positions known at least to their sponsoring groups. Thus, although the NIBBB has claimed responsibility for the Yukon balloon, there are presumably two other groups that are just as capable of claiming responsibility for theirs.

In fact, further exploring the NIBBB site, I learn that another site called SondeHub already tracks every such pico balloon, and a page on the NIBBB site shows that such balloons already operate fully within federal regulations, and due to their small size and very light weight pose no hazard to aviation.

So, why can't Secretary Austin have an aide do what he can to contact all three groups, ask them what their balloon outfits each cost, and offer to reimburse them from the Secretary's personal funds? From what I read, the most expensive balloon outfit, complete with transmitter package, costs in the low three figures. My guess is that Secretary Austin could make that up by foregoing a few five-star restaurant lunches and stopping by Burger King instead, which might be good for him anyhow.

Other photos on the NIBBB website suggest there can be few more wholesome activities. I won't link to them here, because they show minor children working under parental supervision on what look to be school or scout projects.

But there's a bigger question. According to Aviation Week,

“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” says Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a Silicon Valley company that makes purpose-built pico balloons for hobbyists, educators and scientists.

The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.

. . . Aviation Week contacted a host of government agencies, including the FBI, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Security Council (NSC) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for comment about the possibility of pico balloons. The NSC did not respond to repeated requests. The FBI and OSD did not acknowledge that harmless pico balloons are being considered as possible identities for the mystery objects shot down by the Air Force.

“I have no update for you from NORAD on these objects,” a NORAD spokesman says.

Pico balloons, in short, are completely legal, individually licensed, operate within federal regulations, on that basis are no potential harm to aviation, and are comprehensively tracked. Efforts by both the group that sponsored one such balloon and a manufacturer in the industry to contact the relevant agencies and explain what they already should have known were ignored, and at least so far, none has acknowledged what the "UFOs"were other than to make a glib assurance they weren't military or something.

Wouldn't a good-humored acknowledgement, apology, and offer of pro forma reimbursement go a long way here? And maybe even go so far as to suggest they're gonna ease off on Catholic trads and school board protesters? Maybe FBI Director Wray could publicly deliver one such check and announce the FBI was gonna push the reset button.

Just a thought.

The Focus Switches To The University of Delaware -- But What Are They Looking For?

In yesterday's news:

On March 13, 2017, less than seven weeks after concluding his second term as vice president, Joe Biden announced the founding of the Biden Institute at his home state’s University of Delaware (UD). According to the announcement, part of Biden’s “vision for the institute is an annual conference at UD, similar to the World Economic Forum or the Aspen Institute.”

. . . Prior to hosting the Biden Institute, UD had never disclosed any funding from China. One year later (and just two months after the Penn Biden center opened its D.C. office), anonymous donations from China to UD skyrocketed. The first payment came in April 2018 in the amount of $3,204,070 from an anonymous donor in China. In December 2018, another anonymous donation from China arrived for $1,869,515. A third anonymous China-linked payment, for $624,904, arrived in December 2019.

In 2020, the year that Biden was campaigning for president, anonymous Chinese state-linked entities sent three more payments totaling $1,005,761 to UD, the bulk of which arrived after Biden had been declared the president-elect.

In this morning's news:

The FBI raided the University of Delaware twice in recent weeks while probing President Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents, but didn't find any secret papers.

A source familiar with the investigation told CNN that agents and investigations carried out two searches on two separate days at the college in Biden's home state.

No classified material was found, the Wall Street Journal later reported.

Separate batches of materials retrieved from the university were taken from at least two different locations at the school and are now being reviewed by the FBI.

DailyMail.com revealed earlier this month that the business partner of the president's son Hunter Biden was tasked with moving archives to the university in 2010. The documents Eric Schwerin was moving were sensitive enough to require the involvement of White House lawyers.

It looks like the Biden Institute in Delaware was, or is, basically just a clone of the Penn Biden Center, about which the same questions have arisen:

[T]here is growing concern about how donations to UPenn from foreign countries reportedly tripled in the two years after the Biden Penn Center opened. The Washington Free Beacon reported most of the $61 million in gifts and contracts between 2017 and 2019 came from China, citing records from the Department of Education. Republicans and others have long warned of Biden’s potential for conflicts of interest, especially with the multi-million dollar dealings of the president’s son Hunter involving China and other countries.

But from the sketchy information we have, the problem is something beyond just classified documents, since the FBI in some recent searches like the ones in Delaware didn't find any of those, but nevertheless took others that "are now being reviewed".

And let's recall that Biden personally hired M Patrick Moore, Jr, a Boston law firm partner and former White House counsel under Obama, during 2022 to perform unspecified work at the Penn Biden Center, in the course of which he ran across classified documents. It's gradually become known that this led to a much more elaborate effort to sort the situation out, which was initially concealed from the public:

. . . emails released Friday due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Bloomberg, show the Archives secretly coordinating with and accommodating Biden’s personal attorneys to retrieve classified records. The emails also show questions were raised about whether classified materials were also stored in Boston and Philadelphia.

The initial reason or cause for the search at the Penn Biden Center by Biden’s attorneys remains unknown.

But whatever the reason, the search keeps widening, and it looks to me as though the focus isn't necessarily on classified documents. Not only that, but

What’s also interesting about this report is that it appears to have been leaked to multiple news organizations by “two senior law enforcement officials,” in the words of NBC. So someone wants us to know this was going on, even if the White House isn’t telling us.

And let's keep in mind that M Patrick Moore, Jr, who represented Biden personally in the Penn Biden Center project and had some Penn Biden materials shipped to his Boston office, quietly withdrew from representing Biden soon after the classified documents case went public last month. Something is bothering some people, but we have no idea so far what it is.

What Was COVID?

I subscribe to COVID skeptic Alex Berenson's Substack, and it's worth noting that pretty much his entire take on COVID from Day One has been vindicated. The whole regime, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, no church, school closures, work-from-home, universal vaccination and universal boosters, has proven not just ineffective but in many cases counterproductive. Overall public health in terms of life expectancy and the effects of delayed non-COVID care has declined. Is it over, tbough? I'm not sure. One thing I've noticed is that the little stickers and calibrations on sidewalks and floors that reminded people to stay six feet apart have largely disappeared.

This suggests to me that there was a program to power wash them away at some point, probably in the middle of the night, but I went looking for web images of the process on the web -- just a guy in municipal coveralls, say, with a spray wand whooshing away the footprint stickers from a sidewalk -- and came up completely empty. "No matches for your search," no matter how I tried to word things. Apparently the algorithm says this never happened.

Anyhow, Berenson's latest post is working toward a summing up, and while I think this is premature, he makes some worthwhile points:

I had coffee yesterday with someone who’s been a behind-the-scenes Team Reality advocate since 2020 - a doctor who figured out early on that Covid’s risks were far overblown. No, not Jay Bhattacharya , though as it happened we also talked yesterday and the conversation confirmed this one.

We should be optimistic, this doctor said. People get it now, no one’s taking the vaccines, it’s over. (He’s a surgeon, not an epidemiologist, thus his sunny demeanor. It takes a special kind of confidence to cut your fellow humans open. Plus surgery, unlike public health, actually works most of the time.)

And you know what? He’s right. Half-right, anyway. The Covid jabs are dead. All over the world people are voting with their arms. Fewer than 1 in 100 Americans will get an mRNA jab this month.

But the threat that Covid exposed is not over. Not the threat of the virus, which had an average age of death of maybe 82 or 83. Not even the threat of government orders like school closures and lockdowns. Those are awful, but they’re reversible and we seem to have rejected them resoundingly, at least in the United States.

No, I mean the scientific threats that the pandemic has exposed. Covid has revealed how out of control the public health establishment and its handmaiden virologists and immunologists have become. Drug companies too, although their corruption of medicine is less of a surprise.

But was any of this deliberate? Was it all cooked up, say, by Big Pharma to prop up their bottom lines? I don't think so. I think the whole episode was accidental, and the various government responses were adventitious, made up as they went along, and the remedies adopted were almost exclusively bad. If the unspoken motto was Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste, the responses of those charged with not wasting the crisis depended on what each group saw as its particular interest.

I agree with Berenson that one part of the threat was "scientific", but only insofar as a particular interest group bases its claims to authority on "science". As Dr Fauci put it, "Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on Science". But "science" as he and his supporters defined it was secularist materialism, and the accidental crisis allowed a particular influential group of public materialists to pursue a specifically anti-religious agenda, insisting that "science" required closing houses of worship for the indefinite duration, or failing that specifically, strict liturgical limitations on singing, congregation size, serving food, shaking hands, and so forth.

I don't think the goal was ever fully articulated or even fully thought through, because the whole crisis, while manufactured from the start (remember the scary expanding red circles on all the news shows from February 2020 onward?) never had the bvenefit of a central plan or overall objective. Big Pharma got on board only several months in when somebody thought maybe there could be vaccines, and then someone else thought the government should maybe be the one to buy them and make everyone get a shot.

Although the US legal system proved fairly robust in ending the most extreme restrictions on churches, they still aren't completely back. People have been slow to return, and of those returning, some number continue to feel the need to wear masks, which were never effective. There's much less shaking hands at the exchange of peace, and the Los Angeles archdiocese still hasn't returned to distributing wine with the sacrament, even though the alcohol content never made it unsafe.

Although Alex Berenson is a COVID skeptic, he also seems to be a secularist at heart, so he sees the aggrandizement of the public health establishment in the name of "science" as the worst effect of the crisis. But because there was no single agenda behind it -- it was seized on independently by separate opportunistic interests -- some effects will last longer than others. The footprints and calibrations on the floors and sidewalks are already mostly gone, but companies and governments are still havintg a hard time getting people back to the office.

The Pistol In The Dumpster Revisited

Lost in the weekend's news about UFOs and space aliens was this item, covered best as usual in the UK Daily Mail:

The Secret Service has been accused of a 'cover-up' over its alleged involvement in a police investigation when Hunter Biden's lover dumped his gun in a trash can near a school in 2018.

Judicial Watch, a justice watchdog nonprofit, announced on Friday that it received 487 pages of Secret Service (USSS) records over the incident, and says the documents cast further doubt over the agency's claims that it was not involved.

Hunter's lover and brother's widow, Hallie Biden, left his .38 handgun at the top of a trash can at Jansens supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware in October 2018, sparking a police probe.

The reemergence of the story is due to new confirmation of Secret Service involvement in the cleanup, even though Joe was out of office at the time, and Hunter wasn't a protectee as a family member. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch obtained Secret Service communications on the matter:

A flurry of internal emails began on October 29, 2020, when a website called the Blaze published an article about Hallie throwing Hunter's gun in a supermarket trash can.

One official emailed another in the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division a link to the article.

Another official, whose name is redacted, responded: 'Oh dear…'

After reading the article, one Secret Service Protective Intelligence Research Specialist wrote to their colleagues: 'It's kind of odd that we were involved in the missing gun investigation when neither Hunter or Joe were even receiving USSS protection at the time? Hmmm.'

But when this sort of story treats each incident in isolation, it leaves out important context. During the entire period of the affair between Hunter and Hallie, both were heavy users of cocaine, and Hunter's sister, Ashley, who presumably would know, characterized both as "addicts". In the months before the pistol in the dumpster episode, Hunter had been in and out of rehab. According to the New York Post,

Hunter Biden begged his sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden for cash to check himself into rehab just six weeks before purchasing a handgun — and attesting on federal forms that he had never used or been addicted to drugs.

A shocking, 4-minute, 30-second recording was discovered by The Post on a copy of the infamous hard drive Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, and emerges the same week federal agents said they believe they have enough evidence to charge him for making false statements in order to buy the .38-caliber pistol.

. . . In the days before the call, Hunter Biden appears to have completed a course of rehabilitation at The View. The center typically charges $4,000 daily. Hunter’s uncle Jim Biden, however, managed to secure him a bargain rate of $2,500 per day.

His time drying out doesn’t appear to have worked; the points plea came during a period of reportedly extended drug and alcohol use.

“I hesitate to write you this. Because your response is unpredictable. But I can’t help but to plead to you to get well,” Hunter’s sister Ashley Biden wrote to him on Sept. 1, 2018. “Our father is devastated. And his personality has fundamentally changed without you by his side,.”

During this period, Hunter's life appears to have been disintegrating. As I noted in this post, Hunter and Liz Secundy, Hallie's sister, signed a one-year rental agreement on a town house that July, but the relationship among the three seems to have been a menage, since by October, he seems still to have been living with Hallie as well, and it was she who put the pistol in the dumpster. According to the New York Post, Hunter said this on his laptop:

“Then when the police the FBI the secret service [sic] came on the scene she said she took it from me because she was scared I would harm myself due to my drug and alcohol problem and our volatile relationship and that she was afraid for the kids,” he said.

But whatever law enforcement arrived on the scene, and even though Hallie's fear was for the kids, nobody seems to have called child protective services to get the kids out of that environment -- which would be the usual consequence of discovering addicted and alcoholic adults with children and guns in the household.

Then, shortly afterward, according to The Sun,

President Joe Biden’s son, 52, lashed out at Hallie, 47, after claiming to have discovered a designer Hermès box containing what appears to be drug paraphernalia and hard drugs at her home in Wilmington, Delaware.

, , , Two weeks after the gun incident, Hunter texted Hallie the pic of what appears to be a huge crack cocaine rock on top of the Hermès box.

By January 2019, Hunter's laptop showed him in a sensory deprivation tank at Blue Water Wellness in Newburyport, MA, although whatever rehab regimen was in force there didn't keep him from taking hits from a crack pipe while in the tank.

Just one month earlier, Hunter had texted his dad, Joe, complaining he didn't have enough money for the treatment program on top of bills and alimony.

'Hey dad I've been trying to resolve some immediate financial issues - alimony tuitions and my bill for this program but the cash I am counting on will not arrive until the end of the week.

'Is it possible to make me another short term loan in the same amount and I will send it back no later than 10 days.

'I'm really embarrassed to ask and I know it's unfair of me to put you in that position right now,' Hunter wrote on December 4, 2018.

'Hunt tell me what you need. No problem,' the future president responded. 'Ok how do you want to do this I can pay tuition directly and their housing and give you the rest.'

Biden senior messaged again on December 6 to confirm: '75 being wired today. Love.'

This is just one slice of the Hunter timeline covering the period surrounding Hunter's purchase of a gun he was clearly not entitled to have, the feckless and drug-addled efforts of his inner circle to address the problem, and Joe's continued enabling of Hunter's dissipation, not only by funding it to the tune of repeated infusions of cash, but also apparently by calling on federal law enforcement to do cleanup as well.

Interestingly, the gun shop owner involved, possibly sensing irregularities, refused to cooperate with whomever claimed to be from the Secret Service. (I don't rule out Dale Pupillo and Robert Savage III, the two former Secret Service executives who'd been eased out but were apparently then put on the Biden personal payroll. They appear to have impersonated agents in the episode at The Jeremy in Hollywood back in May 2018 as well.)

But the big question that nobody else has asked is that by Hunter's implied account on his laptop, more than one level of law enforcement was involved in tracking down the gun that Hallie left in the dumpster, and at least by Hallie's account, she was concerned for her kids. But any normal law enforcement investigation involving kids, drugs, and guns would wind up taking the kids away. That night. This didn't happen here. Why not?

Project Bluebeam

Regarding the curtrent spate of UFOs, Time reports,

Other than the first balloon, which China has acknowledged was theirs, the Pentagon doesn’t yet know what the objects are or where they came from. Asked directly, a senior military official did not rule out the possibility that their provenance could be extraterrestrial.

I have several reactions, the main one being that if these are alien visitors, they would have needed warp drive-style technology to get here, given their likely home planet would be hundreds or thousands of light years away. So an obsolescent F-16 with a heat-seeking missile can shoot one down as it piddles along at 20,000 feet? This doesn't even fit the War of the Worlds model of alien invasion. According to Wikipedia,

The main narrative begins when an object thought to be a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the narrator's home. The narrator discovers that it is an artificial cylinder. Some Martians emerge briefly, but have difficulty coping with Earth's atmosphere and gravity. When humans approach the cylinder with a white flag, the Martians incinerate them. Military forces arrive that night.

. . . The next day, the narrator takes his wife to safety in nearby Leatherhead. That day, he sees a three-legged Martian "fighting-machine" (tripod), armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the poisonous "black smoke". Tripods have wiped out the army around the cylinder and destroyed most of Woking.

. . . [The narrator] begins to go mad from his trauma, finally attempting suicide by openly approaching a stationary fighting machine. To his surprise, he discovers that all the Martians have been killed by an onslaught of earthly pathogens, to which they had no immunity.

H G Wells was a 19th-century bourgeois optimist, and, a Darwinian, he saw the force of natural selection overcoming the evil of alien invasion, even though the aliens had a temporary technological advantage. But if the mysterious cylindrical or octagonal objects drifting over Canada and the Great Lakes are from aliens, they seem to be slow and bumbling, they don't fly all that high, and they so far don't seem to have a heat ray.

The YouTube commentator Mark Dice raises the issue of Project Bluebeam, something I hadn't heard of before:

The premise is that government will use a manufactured threat of alien invasion to create mass panic and impose a social agenda. If that's so, they aren't even at the H G Wells/Orson Welles level of inducing it -- but wait a moment. Mark Dice doesn't even mention COVID. As we ever so slowly transition to the morning-after phase of the COVID mass panic, we're gradually being told that the vaccines were ineffective, and even more recently, study after study has confirmed that masks were ineffective as well. In fact, those studies were being published throughout the period of lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distance. Here's one from 2020:

A cloth mask or face covering does very little to prevent the emission or inhalation of small particles. As discussed in an earlier CIDRAP commentary and more recently by Morawska and Milton (2020) in an open letter to WHO signed by 239 scientists, inhalation of small infectious particles is not only biologically plausible, but the epidemiology supports it as an important mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. . . . We also worry that the public doesn't understand the limitations of cloth masks and face coverings when we observe how many people wear their mask under their nose or even under their mouth, remove their masks when talking to someone nearby, or fail to practice physical distancing when wearing a mask.

Even so, the authors carefully hedged their position, insisting that since masks themselves were ineffective, ever more stringent lockdown and distancing measures were the real solution. No doubt this allowed them to keep their jobs despite their heterodox views. Notwithstanding the unsupportability of the public health establishment's claims, even at the height of the pandemic, the narrative was maintained.

What we're learning from the Twitter files and other sources is that an elaborate social mechanism was in place to enforce the norms of the moral panic, and only now, three years later, are we beginning to recover. Over the weekend, our Roman Catholic parish had a fundraising dinner, and our pastor during brief remarks suggested that in many ways, the process of getting back to normal worship life was only beginning. Looking back at the first months of 2020, a key focus of the public health agenda was to prohibit religious gatherings of any sort, indoor or outdoor, prohibit singing or responsive worship, forbid the distribution of food in any religious context, and eliminate hymnals, prayer books, and missals.

In hindsight, these efforts, done in the name of "science", were misguided and ineffective; luckily, sustained legal effort was able to defeat them fairly quickly, although as our pastor pointed out, only now, and only gradually, has the parish been able to recover something as routine as post-Sunday mass coffee hour. I don't rule out that, given even the hokey UFOs we're now seeing at the Plan 9 Fron Outer Space level, the authorities might intend to resume their attack on ordinary institutions in the name of "science".

Pound The Table II

Out of all the weekend's news, the UFOs, the FBI wanting to infiltrate the sedevacantists, the new revelations on the classified document coverup, the one thing I haven't been able to drop is why Abbe Lowell has been pounding the table for his client, Hunter Biden. I talked about this Friday. I'm not a lawyer, but then, neither was Raymond Burr, who just played one on TV. But Jonathan Turley is one, both a law professor and a practicing criminal defense attorney, and he offers an insight that I'd missed:

[Lowell and the Biden team] seem to be adopting the strategy of Steve Bannon that resulted in his conviction for contempt of Congress. Lowell categorically refused to turn over material to Congress this week, leaving his client open to a subpoena and possible prosecution. The move may have thrilled hardcore Democrats, but it is the Republicans who should be most ecstatic with Hunter's initial position.

. . . In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY), Lowell declared "Peddling your own inaccurate and baseless conclusions under the guise of a real investigation, turns the Committee into ‘Wonderland’ and you into the Queen of Hearts shouting, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwords.’"

. . . Lowell would have been far smarter to turn over some material to the Committee in good faith while seeking to negotiate on the scope of the inquiry.

. . . In the Bannon case, the Democrats spared little time in seeking a contempt order. Just one week after Bannon missed a date to appear, they voted out the contempt sanction of Committee, and it was quickly approved by the House as a whole. It was contempt of Congress, as I said at the time.

. . . He just [laid] the foundation for the Oversight Committee to move quickly toward a subpoena and ultimately a contempt sanction, if he maintains this position. Lowell actually expedited the process for the House, shortening the calendar for possible contempt proceedings. If this matter were to go to the courts (either as a criminal contempt matter or an enforcement matter, or both), there is now plenty of time for the Committee to prevail in securing much of this material.

That would place Attorney General Merrick Garland in a tough position. After years of the Justice Department largely ignoring contempt sanctions, Garland moved aggressively to prosecute Trump figures like Bannon. The failure to do so with Hunter Biden would fuel concerns over political bias at the Department.

Just from watching true crime shows on TV, I can figure out that especially for a guilty client but even if a case is 50-50, it's in the defense's interest to delay everything. Witnesses' memories deteriorate, police officers leave the force, parties pass away, the case fades into obscurity. Lowell could have unctuously feigned cooperation, turning over thousands of pages of completely innocuous material whlle pretending to negotiate with the committee in good faith. In fact, he could then, standing in front of cartons stacked on dollies, publicly remonstrate that the committee is disregarding his ample cooperation and pursuing a political agenda.

Instead, he leaves this strategy aside, angrily refuses any pretense of compromise, and pounds the table. Taking a different route, Prof Turley is more or less confirming my own instinct that if Abbe Lowell is such a smart guy, why is he acting so dumb? He wrote Chairman Comer a letter that a simple English major could do a better job with -- in fact, an AI bot could have written it, and it quite possibly could have done it for free. I don't want to think about Abbe Lowell's bill for the week. But the bottom line is that, with every delay to his advantage, he set things up for the quickest possible Republican response.

If nothing else, this calls into question Bidenworld's judgment overall. People can claim Joe has cognitive issues, but here, he's surrounded by White House counsel, private attorneys, political advisers, and even family -- from what we hear, first ladies like Nancy Reagan have had great behind-the-scenes influence, as have presidential sons like Bush fils. Whatever Biden's own mental capacity -- my view continues to be that he's been dumb as a rock all his life, but he hasn't deteriorated that much -- nobody around him seems able to give better advice.

They're paying Abbe Lowell how much? And he's doing that? Where are Biden's advisers? Where's Jill? Well, she's smooching Kamala's husband (there's a Bob Dylan lyric lurking there someplace). Where's Ashley? Where's, er, Hunter? Well, as Aquinas said, sin dulls the intellect.

Who Is Kathy Chung?

Almost completely ignored in Thursday's news was this item, which shows how poorly reporters are actually following the classified documents story:

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has issued a detailed request to a former Joe Biden "gatekeeper" for documents and communications from her time working at the Penn-Biden center, specifically anything related to her involvement in the handling and removal of "highly classified" materials.

The story doesn't even mention the gatekeeper's name until halfway down:

"The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden's possession of highly classified documents from his time as Vice President," Comer wrote to Kathy Chung in a Feb. 4 letter. "The documents retrieved from President Biden's personal office and home included documents designated as 'sensitive compartmented information' ... which is used for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources. The Committee has obtained evidence showing that you had keycard access to Penn Biden Center. Recent reporting indicates in January 2017 you — while serving as then-Vice President Biden's executive assistant — helped pack up the departing Vice President's office.

I've run into her here and there over the past several weeks. for instance in this story at the UK Daily Mail on January 19:

Kathy Chung, who served as Biden's administrative assistant when he was vice president, has been interviewed by law enforcement about the scandal.

She told associates she is 'distressed' that she may have 'inadvertently been involved in moving or storing classified material' that a Biden lawyer later uncovered at the Penn Biden Center in November, the Washington Post reported.

I haven't been the only person following the case to note that no photos of her appear to be available. However, based on the timeline, I would expect her to be close to retirement age, since she has been a longtime denizen of Bidenworld.

Who is Kathy Chung? Curiously, neither the U.K. Daily Mail nor Fox News, both of which are experts at digging up photos, has been able to come up with a picture of Ms. Chung, despite her currently serving in a rather public position for a rather public figure, the Defense secretary, Lloyd Austin.

. . . Kathy Chung (aka Kathy Sang-Ok Chung, Kathy S. Geraghty) was an assistant to then Vice President Joe Biden--that is, in 2015.

The AKAs simply don't register in web searches. According to the Daily Mail link above,

Chung was an assistant in the Senate Office of the Vice President, after working for a trio of influential senators, including former Delaware Sen. Ted [Kaufman], a longtime Biden advisor who filled his seat when Biden left the Senate.

This brings us to Ted Kaufman. According to Wikipedia,

Kaufman was appointed to the Senate to serve the remainder of longtime Senator Joe Biden's term after he was elected Vice President in 2008. Prior to becoming a U.S. Senator, Kaufman had served as an advisor to Biden for much of his political career and later served as the head of his presidential transition.

In 1972 he joined Joe Biden's U.S. Senate campaign, which was considered to be a long shot, on a volunteer basis. After Biden's surprise victory in 1972, he took a one-year leave of absence from DuPont to organize and head Senator Biden's Delaware Office. In 1976 he became Biden's Chief of Staff and administrative assistant and served until 1995, also working on Biden's subsequent Senate campaigns. After Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, Kaufman was chosen to head Biden's transition team.

In other words, Kaufman was a long-time Biden political retainer dating from his initial Senate campaign, and Kathy Chung appears to have worked for Kaufman and Biden himself, at least on and off, for much of the same period.

According to Fox News, when Biden's previous executive assistant as vice president, Michele Smith, left that job in 2012, Hunter Biden recommended Chung as her replacement.

Throughout much of her five-year tenure working for Biden during the Obama administration, Chung regularly communicated with Biden's son Hunter Biden, transmitting information about his father's schedule and passing messages directly from the then-vice president, according to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and verified by Fox News Digital.

During this period, she appears to have worked with Hunter on a familiar basis to relay sensitive information to him. The Daily Mail reproduces an e-mail from the laptop, via the Marco Polo site, from June 7, 2015, wherein from her Executive Office of the President e-mail account she e-mails Hunter at his Rosemont Seneca account with the private cell numbers of nearly 30 people, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Joe Manchin, Steny Hoyer, and Loretta Lynch.

One thing I've come to notice about Bidenworld is that it's populated by long-term retainers, to the point that some, like Ted Kaufman, have simply aged out due to the length of Biden's career. Kathy Chung appears to have moved in and out of the Biden orbit, though likely never too far away. and she's returned to the inner circle when needed.

It seems to me that what such people have in common, and what makes them valuable to the Bidens, is that they're reflexively familiar with how the family operates, and they've been with them so long they can't be shocked by anything they see.

The picture that's beginning to emerge for me is that Biden has been the same guy, and the people around him have operated the same way, for at least 50 years. For that whole period, it's been important that the people around the family be impervious to what might otherwise shock ordinary people. As I said the other day, if you think there's hanky-pank going on, there probably is, and it's worse than you imagined.

Pound The Table

I'm still puzzled about Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden's most visible and likely most expensive attorney. Via this account at The Hill,

In a sharply worded opening volley against the House GOP’s probe into Hunter Biden and the business dealings of President Biden’s family, an attorney for the president’s son denied a request for documents and information from the Oversight and Accountability Committee, saying it has “no legislative purpose.”

“Peddling your own inaccurate and baseless conclusions under the guise of a real investigation, turns the Committee into ‘Wonderland’ and you into the Queen of Hearts shouting, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwords,’” Abbe David Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, wrote a letter sent Thursday.

I've never been to law school, and I'm not an attorney. But just a lifetime spent following the news suggests to me that I could have written this statement, and in fact, since I was an English major, I probably could have written a better one. It was utterly predictable, and it was inflammatory, so it will just get Chairman Comer and other high-profile Republicans mad at him, and it will simply add to the eventual fireworks at committee hearings.

Contrast that with the usual consensus attorneys seem to have about defendants, for instance, Sam Bankman-Fried:

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of FTX, has been unusually talkative following the November collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange and his subsequent indictment on fraud and other charges. He’s given a series of interviews intended to present his version of events and used social media to criticize the new management of FTX. The atypical chattiness for a criminal defendant is likely causing Bankman-Fried’s attorneys to scratch their heads, or worse.

Granted, it's Abbe Lowell running his mouth on Hunter Biden's behalf, unlike Sam Bankman-Fried, who's running his mouth on his own behalf. This maybe also brings up something a lawyer told me after I served as a juror in his trial. He won his case, and I complimented him by saying, "I never got to hear an argument by Earl Rogers (a prominent early 20th century Los Angeles attorney who was so good that Clarence Darrow hired him), but I think I just saw something like it. If I'm ever in trouble, I'll call you!" He answered, "You'll never be in that kind of trouble," by which I think he meant that if I'd even managed just to qualify for jury duty, I'd avoided the kind of problems that would make me need to hire him.

But maybe that goes to Hunter Biden's problem. He started out living the sort of life where eventually he was going to need to hire Abbe Lowell. So I was going to write something like, "If I were looking at a likely federal indictment, I'd want to hire an attorney who'd advise me to make no statements, and in fact I'd want him to make only calm and decorous statements on my behalf while he works behind the scenes," but as the attorney suggested, that's why I'm not facing likely federal indictment.

So Abbe Lowell is in Abbe Lowell land, dealing with denizens of that strange place and making a very good living at it, and no doubt the attorney I spoke with sees things in a very similar light. This is kabuki, and Abbe Lowell is a star of sorts. It's like pro wrestling, where there's a villain, or "heel", who plays against a hero, or "face", and they perform in scripted matches. The problem is that his clients are heels. They're going to go down. Abbe Lowell's best chance is to get them mistrials, hung juries, prosecutors who'll refuse to prosecute, or as a longshot, an occasional acquittal.

Meanwhile, he pounds the table. I've still got to wonder how he makes $2000 an hour (or something in that ballpark) for doing this. I could have written his letter to Rep Comer for him. In fact, mine would have been better. Heck, an AI bot could have written that letter. I guess it goes to questions like how people think someone like Adam Sandler is a good actor and can make $20 million per movie. If you think about it, that's way more than Abbe Lowell.

One way or another, though, Hunter Biden is going down. If you think about it, that's part and parcel of why the guy hired Abbe Lowell.

Two Biden Puzzles

I wound up with two big puzzles about Joe Biden yesterday. They're just about equal in my thinking, but the kiss between Dr Jill and Kamala Harris's husband, Doug Emhoff, was the most visible. The Washington Free Beacon, from which the photo analylsis above was taken, added:

Conclusion: A bizarre and unsettling incident. Both parties appear to have initiated physical contact and can be seen expressing a range of emotions following the encounter. Something is going on, we're just not entirely sure what it is.

The Biden family has a long history of marital chaos, so an illicit relationship would not be unprecedented. It wouldn't even be the family's most egregious case of infidelity. That title certainly belongs to Hunter Biden, who cheated on his ex-wife with his dead brother's widow and her sister.

But someone called "Dr Romance" pooh-poohed any untoward imputations:

The U.S. Sun recently spoke with Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D. (aka "Dr. Romance"), licensed psychotherapist and author of Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Fighting about the Three Things That Can Ruin Your Relationship, to get some answers regarding the First Lady and Second Gentleman's intimate moment.

According to Dr. Romance, who has 45 years of experience in counseling individuals and couples, the professional consensus is that the kiss was likely a "familial greeting between close friends.

"I think the First Lady and Second Gentleman are probably close friends since they work together a lot and share similar 'second banana' duties," Dr Romance explained.

"I'm surprised they kissed on the lips in public because you would think they'd know the press would have a field day."

Most psychotherapists I've seen on YouTube and elsewhere talk about things like "healthy boundaries". Mouth kissing someone else's husband at a public event is not "healthy boundaries". To have two corporate senior executives, married to other people, kiss each other on the lips in public at a corporate event, notwithstanding a putatively close "working relationship", would probably result in the board of directors taking some sort of action, as it could be an indication that policies on sexcual harassment are being violated.

In some contexts, that sort of public kiss would be a sign that one or both marriages is over. Looked at another way, it could be taken as a major put-down of Joe, implying that Jill was blatantly going elsewhere for affection. Whatever the specific context, it's hard to avoid the Washington Free Beacon's characterization that the indident was "bizarre and unsettling".

Let's keep in mind that Dr Jill in particular had to be fully aware that the cameras were focused on her grand entry in her stunning blah blah blah. Part of the messatge she was sending must have been along the line of Quid licet Jovi, non licet bovi, "What is permitted for the gods is not permitted for the cattle". That in turn makes me wonder if she and/or Emhoff had indulged in some sort of artificial grandiosity before the event, viz, maybe snorted something.

The other, less visible but just as troubling question is covered in this story, White House dodges on Biden's $250K line of credit against beach home. Ms Jean-Pierre's response was to refer the reporter to the White House Counsel's office, which is an implication that the money is for the president's legal defense. But if that's the case, as I've been pointing out here, $250,000 is little more than a rounding error in the Biden family's actual legal expenses.

Right now, press reports put four partner-level attorneys on Joe's classified documents case and four other partner-level attorneys on Hunter's tax case. Recent reporting on Hunter's financial situation suggests he's more or less penniless despite his sale of some paintings and needs to start a legal defense fund, while it's suggested that Joe and Jill have taken out the credit line for Joe's case, although it may be to cover legal expenses for Hunter as well.

I've been saying that partner-level attorneys bill for up to $2500 an hour, while the US average is about $750 an hour. Let's be really conservative and say all eight on the Biden cases are billing $1000 an hour each for 40 hours a week. Eight partners X $1000 X 40 hours = $320,000 a week. So the credit line on the Rehoboth Beach house won't even cover a week of attorneys' fees on the Biden cases. But reports suggest that Covington & Burling partners have been working on the classified documents since at least last October, while Abbe Lowell has been working on Hunter's taxes since early December, with Kevin Morris working for Hunter since at least 2021.

Eight partners billing $320,000 for 16 weeks is $5.12 million. This is just an order-of-magnitude estimate; remember that someone like Abbe Lowell is probably billing for much more. And so far, all these high-priced attorneys are doing is saber rattling:

A lawyer for Hunter Biden is warning those involved in promulgating assertions about his infamous laptop computer that they could face unspecified litigation over their claims.

Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, who took over as Biden’s counsel in December, sent the “litigation hold” letters on Wednesday to 14 people allegedly linked to efforts to generate coverage critical of the 53-year-old son of President Joe Biden, according to a person familiar with the development.

Should the Biden family choose to pursue this sort of legal action, it would certainly cost tens of millions in addition to what they're already spending. Where would this money come from? For that matter, where are the millions they've already spent coming from? Even lines of credit on every possible Biden property won't cover the current cost of their attorneys.

These two issues alone are making me question the judgment of pretty much everyone surrounding the Biden family. It's not just Joe or anything to do with a medical condition. Look at Jill, look at his legal advisers. Kamala has always given me the impression she's a party girl, but now I'm wondering about Jill, and that says something about what Joe's been like since before he married her. That's been 50 years. This isn't a recent thing at all.

Business As Usual In Bidenworld

I was going to head this post with a photo of Liz Secundy, Hallie Biden's older sister, with whom Hunter was conducting an affair at the same time as the one with Hallie, but as we saw in the posts here from Monday and Tuesday, if you think there's hanky-pank going on in Bidenworld, it probably is, and in fact, it's worse than you imagined. I'll say nothing more about Jill and the Second Gentleman.

Anyhow, if you're interested, there's a photo of Liz at right. According to the Daily Mail on February 21, 2021,

Hunter Biden had a controversial affair with his brother Beau's grieving widow Hallie, while exchanging raunchy texts, 'partying', and even renting a house with her sister, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Hallie Biden's older sister, Elizabeth Secundy, who was recently separated from her husband of 15 years, referred to Hunter as her 'prince' and told him she loved him, in a series of text messages dating back to 2016.

The pair's relationship was revealed in files and emails recovered from Hunter's laptop - the contents of which became public last year after it was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop.

According to the Daily Mail, the relationship with Liz seems to have been more like a menage a trois with Hallie from the start:

A friend with knowledge of Hunter's relationships told DailyMail.com that Beau's former home soon became a very different environment with Hunter, Hallie and Secundy 'partying' there regularly.

'They were living at Beau's old house and it just became a party house. They were obviously up 24/7 just partying,' the source said. 'They would sit out on the patio like crackheads almost.

Almost like crackheads. The record we've already seen is that Hallie was characterized as an "addict" along with Hunter by none other than Hunter's sister Ashley, and if Liz was in on the party, it's hard to avoid thinking she was involved as well. It's also worth noting that based on other e-mails we've seen from Hunter, he was concerned that Hallie's pre-teen children were in the house while all the partying was taking place, although he appears to have done nothing to fix the situation, for instance by moving out and taking the drugs with him;

It's worth noting that although Liz had an expensive lifestyle that seems to have included drug use, she'd divorced her husband, had no other source of money, and had never worked a day in her life.

The texts on Hunter's laptop also show Secundy asked Hunter and her sister for money repeatedly, saying she was left near-penniless after her breakup with her husband.

On August 18, 2016, Secundy wrote to Hunter saying: 'hey.... can you send me more money? sorry to ask. i promise it won't be much longer. Joel took that job. xxoo'

A week later she wrote, 'f*** I don't even have any money for parking. This is a nightmare that I can't wake up from.'

Months later, on April 10, 2017, she sent Hunter another message saying: 'are you able to give me $500?'

She also messaged Hunter and Hallie in a three-way conversation on April 26, 2017, saying: 'hunt/hallie can you please hire me now .....so i can get my life together and then i will find my own job and unburden both of you.'

Hunter replied to the two of them: 'Hallie it's called leverage.'

Secundy replied: 'so is that a yes? i hate asking for money everyday. it's the worst feeling.'

It's hard to imagine how, with no actual work experience by almost 50 and a drug habit, she thought she would be employable in any real job. But in fact, Hunter put her on the payroll of his "law firm", Owasco PC, during 2018, along with Hallie, his baby mama Lunden Roberts, and some number of other "assistants" who at minimum he was sexually harassing if not paying them directly for sex:

Documents on his abandoned laptop show Hunter put his lover and brother's widow Hallie Biden on his company payroll, as well as her sister Liz Secundy, with whom he also had an affair, texts reveal.

He also hired his daughter's basketball coach, reportedly former stripper Lunden Roberts, but ended her employment and stopped responding to her messages after she told him she was pregnant with his child. Roberts eventually had to sue him for child support.

It appears that the relationship with Liz was concurrent with the affair with Hallie throughout the 2015-2019 period of Hunter's life, and also via the Daily Mail,

Hunter and Secundy signed a rental agreement together on a $2,200-per-month, three-bed colonial townhouse in Greenville, Delaware, on July 3, 2018, according to documents on the abandoned laptop.

The rental agreement, listing the two as tenants and Patterson-Schwartz & Associates as the landlord's agent, was from August 2018 to July 2019.

During 2018, Hunter was traveling extravagantly with Lunden Roberts, and she became pregnant with his daughter. He also had an unnamed "assistant" at Owasco on the payroll, but according to the Daily Mail, he was also paying her lump sums totaling $44,000 over a four-month period. May 2018 marked the episode at The Jeremy in Hollywood where the former Secret Service executives tried to remonstrate with Hunter over his charges for Russian escorts. That July, he was barred from the Chateau Marmont for drug use. October 2018 marked the gun-in-the-dumpster incident where Hallie took Hunter's gun and put it into a supermarket dumpster, whereupon a homeless person found it and took it, prompting the Secret Service to try to cover up any record of its existence, notwithstanding Joe was out of office during that period.

However, by January 2019, Hunter's funding sources had begun to run dry, and Joe was forced to provide $800,000 to cover his debts. Following an initial attempt to get Hunter into rehab in late 2018, the family cracked down in March 2019, just before Joe was set to announce his presidential candidacy for 2020.

I haven't been able to find out what's become of Hallie and Liz since then. I can only surmise that neither is employable or marriageable in any realistic way, but without some generous arrangement for their support, they could be inconvenient for the Biden family. At least the family isn't the Clintons.