The Wall Street Journal Goes There

On Saturday, I posted on the expanding Overton window that's beginning to encompass the question of what President Biden might have done in his role as "point person" for Ukraine during the Obama administration to put us where we are in the stalled Russo-Ukraine War. The key question that's been raised by Seymour Hersh is what President Zelensky may know about Biden's involvement in Ukraine's politics while Biden was vice president that could give Zelensky leverage over current US policy.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran a column by Holman W Jenkins Jr, Hunter Biden Is a Geopolitical Disaster, that indirectly raises the same question, but it tries to make Hunter the culprit, not Joe. The column itself is behind a paywall, but a good part of it is excerpted at Instapundit. Joe Biden while vice president

allowed a family environment in which milking connection to Joe was de rigueur. Paralysis seizes our elite over what has ensued.

. . . At some point, questions should also be asked of Barack Obama. Why allow Mr. Biden to control the Ukraine portfolio when he wouldn’t restrain his son? Was Biden family corruption the reason you skipped over your veep and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016?

The story here is all the more remarkable for being untold. In short order, the Hunter mess has managed to taint our intelligence community, the FBI, IRS and now the Justice Department. If news sense is not completely dulled by neurotic compliance, some editors must also be starting to see the outlines of another approaching debacle, in which skeletons from the Biden closet elect Mr. Trump.

In other words, Mr Jenkins goes the long way around to ask what Seymour Hersh also asks, what does Zelensky have on Biden? In Mr Jenkins's view, this could become a big enough story to tip the 2024 election.

This brought me to look at how the "Hunter mess" got started, at least as it relates to Ukraine, and there's actually very little available about this. A 2019 op-ed by John Solomon at The Hill says,

The timing of Hunter Biden’s and [Devon] Archer’s appointment to Burisma’s board has been highlighted in the past, by The New York Times in December 2015 and in a 2016 book by conservative author Peter Schweizer.

. . . President Obama named Biden the administration’s point man on Ukraine in February 2014, after a popular revolution ousted Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and as Moscow sent military forces into Ukraine’s Crimea territory.

According to Schweizer’s book, Vice President Biden met with Archer in April 2014 right as Archer was named to the board at Burisma. A month later, Hunter Biden was named to the board, to oversee Burisma’s legal team.

Solomon then rehearses what was already known of Hunter's and Archer's positions on the Burisma board, their generous directors' fees, and millions of dollars otherwise paid to Biden entities, evidence that was available as of 2019 even before the discovery of Hunter's laptop in 2020. Solomon concludes,

Nonetheless, some hard questions should be answered by Biden as he prepares, potentially, to run for president in 2020: Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work was performed for the money Hunter Biden’s firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe? And when it was publicly announced that your son worked for Burisma, should you have recused yourself from leveraging a U.S. policy to pressure the prosecutor who very publicly pursued Burisma?

As far as we're beginning to learn as of 2023, there were more payments to the Bidens for more millions from other Ukrainians over matters beyond Burisma, but the question of whether, and how, just the Burisma investigation was thwarted hasn't been sufficiently investigated. Testimony from Devon Archer to the Comer committee that's expected today is likely to expand our understanding of these transactions:

Archer visited Biden's vice presidential residence for a holiday reception in December 2009, and he met with Biden in the West Wing of the White House on April 16, 2014, just days before Archer and Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings in Ukraine.

Archer also played golf with Joe and Hunter Biden in the Hamptons at least once during the Obama administration in August 2014, four months after he and Hunter joined Burisma.

I don't think Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal is out of line to see "the outlines of another approaching debacle".

Yup, Hunter's Left The White House

In a story that I think confirms my speculation in Friday's post, the New York Post reported on Friday:

The first son cut a dejected figure as he arrived at Los Angeles’ Van Nuys Airport in a private plane early Friday — as a documentary filmmaker captured his every move.

Hunter, 53, touched down just before 1 a.m. SoCal time, more than 36 hours after Delaware US District Judge Maryellen Noreika blew the whistle on a wrist-slap plea agreement cooked up by Hunter’s attorneys and father Joe’s Department of Justice.

As an airport worker retrieved Hunter’s bags, the first son was consoled on the tarmac by an unidentified friend sporting a Yankees cap and a mustard-colored sweater. A camera operator observed the scene a few feet away.

The Post had nothing to say about whose jet this was, but I think we can assume it was the same one that he flew in with Kevin Morris to Philadelphia Tuesday night to attend his Delaware court session, Kevin Morris's plane.

I think this helps firm up a timeline. It seems to be generally understood, although there are no public White House logs to confirm or disprove it, that Hunter had been in residence there since sometime last year. In the weekends prior to this past July 4, including the holiday weekend itself, Hunter had accompanied Joe to Camp David. In the inquiries after the discovery of the baggie outside the Situation Room, it was acknowledged that Hunter had been in the White House just before the family departed for Camp David.

A uniformed Secret Service officer discovered the baggie during the evening of July 2 while the family was still away. By the afternoon of July 4, Hunter, Joe, Dr Jill, and little Beau were filmed on the White House balcony during a vignette in which Hunter stepped away briefly to do something with his nose, to the evident discomfort of Joe and Dr Jill. (Mrs Hunter, Melissa Cohen, wasn't in the scene.)

Over the following week, gosh darn, the Secret Service announced the baggie could have belonged to any of 500 people and dropped further investigation.

The next we heard of Hunter's whereabouts, according to the UK Daily Mail, Hunter was in LA on July 21 paying Kevin Morris a visit, during which Mr Morris stepped out onto his balcony to take a hit from a bong. Then, on July 25, Morris flew Hunter from LA to Philadelphia to attend the court hearing the following day.

The last time Kevin Morris made the news in his private jet was this past April 30, when he flew from Los Angeles to Dulles Airport, where he picked up Hunter and flew him back to

Newport Municipal Airport in Jackson County, [AR,] 34 miles from the Independence County Courthouse in Batesville, where Biden attended [a court] hearing the next morning.

When the hearing concluded, Morris flew Hunter back to Dulles. This is further suggestion that as of April, Hunter was operating out of the White House. But it's worth pointing out another data point farther down in the story at that link:

Flight records show the aircraft landing in or taking off from Fayetteville, Ark. at least nine times between February 2022 and April 2023.

Fayetteville is the home of Edward Prewitt, Hunter Biden’s financial advisor.

Laptop emails show Prewitt had access to several business accounts linked to Hunter Biden.

Morris — reached by phone in Hawaii — declined to comment.

So we have some level of suggestion that up to the time of the Secret Service investigation into the baggie, Hunter had been living at the White House, certainly since last spring. Then, following the July 2 discovery of the baggie and the apparent public bump on the balcony, Hunter is no longer at the White House, and the Secret Service is driving him around LA instead.

My hypothesis continues to be that some combination of remonstrances from Joe's staff and the Secret Service led to a decision to put more distance between Hunter and Joe, sending him back to LA and relying on some combination of Kevin Morris amd an LA Secret Service detail to babysit the First Cokehead, at least for the time being.

But in light of the new conditions for Hunter's pretrial release, which include not to use alcohol at all, not to use or unlawfully possess a narcotic drug, and not to break any federal, state, or local law, this would seem to be a high-risk strategy.

But let's leave aside the cost to the taxpayer of using the Secret Service as Hunter's minders and limo service. It looks like Kevin Morris is flying Hunter around the country whenever he needs it, and he's paying, apparently, for Hunter's legal bills in the multimillions, plus pocket money for Hunter, who is otherwise unemployed, traveling around money for Melissa, plus whatever the current costs are for separate living arrangements for Hunter, Melissa, and little Beau, plus Beau's nannies and daycare.

This is a lot for Mr Morris to be picking up, even if there's a quid pro quo. But what on earth could Mr Morris want to buy for that much money? What's behind all this? Is it even coming out of Mr Morris's resources, or is someone paying him back?

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't MeanThey Aren't Out To Get You

One factor in the current environment that hasn't had much notice is the expansion of the Overton window, the range of ideas politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. These include notions that only a short time ago would have been considered "paranoid" or "conspiracy theories".

The most prominent example is how the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr has advanced interpretations of events that only a year or two ago would have been deemed dangerously heterodox, and he's gaining an audience. For instance, Bill Ackman, "one of the most influential investors on Wall Street", has begun to endorse Kennedy's views on COVID vaccines:

Bill Ackman said in 2021 that delaying Covid vaccinations for older Americans “seems like genocide.”

Today, the influential hedge fund chief and investor is amplifying the debunked anti-vaccine views of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Ackman is not denying his change. In fact, he said Kennedy is asking “important questions” about vaccines, raising issues he is interested in learning more about.

Or take Seymour Hersh, whose reporting since the My Lai massacre has always pushed the envelope, but his more recent stories, especially his allegation that

US Navy divers, acting under the direct orders of US President Joe Biden, planted C4 explosives on the [Nordstream] pipelines during routine NATO exercises in June last year, before remotely activating the bombs three months later

have been met with intense skepticism. More recently, he's said this about dissent within the US intelligence community over the Ukraine war:

Let’s take a look at recent events in the Ukraine war from the point of view of those in the American intelligence community who don’t feel they have the ear of President Joe Biden but should.

. . . The Biden administration’s role in both [of the Ukrainian] attacks [on the Kerch bridge] was vital. “Of course it was our technology,” one American official told me. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged—like a torpedo.” I asked if there was any thought before the bridge attack about the possibility of retaliation. “What will Putin do? We don’t think that far,” the official said. “Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision.”

. . . At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the official said, “Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan—a poor waif in his underwear—and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking. Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”

In other words, what does Zelensky have on Biden? Even a couple of months ago, this would have been well outside the range of acceptable questions, but with the steady stream of revelations from Sen Grassley and the Comer committee involving millions in under-the-table payments from Ukrainians and others, it isn't that far off base. As Mr Ackman said about Kennedy Jr, we're interested in learning more.

Or take Oliver Stone, not long ago denounced for "loony JFK conspiracies", who more recently has expanded on his views about US involvement in Ukraine:

Stone spoke on a recent episode of commentator Russell Brand’s talk show "Stay Free" on Rumble. Stone won international fame for his documentaries, one of which was "Ukraine on Fire." This documentary is described on IMDb as one that details the ousting of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in a "coup d'état" aided by the United States government in 2014.

. . . He then slammed the "Neoconservative movement who started the war in Iraq" who yet remain "deep inside our government," citing prominent figures like Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He went on to add that "Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and he really hates the old Soviet Union which he confounds again with the Russian Federation, which is not communist."

. . . "If we don’t stop this, what Biden is doing, this guy is – I voted for him – I made a mistake, I was thinking he was an old man now that he would calm down, that he would be more mellow and so-forth, I didn’t see that at all," he said. "I see a man who maybe is not in charge of his own administration. Who knows?"

The problem we're looking at in all these cases is that there are new data points that we've begun to recognize can't be explained within our existing cognitive models, so we're forced to go outside them. What happened in the 1960s was that we had not a single, isolated political assassination out of the blue -- like, say, President McKinley's in 1901 or James Garfield's in 1881 -- but a sequence of three over five years, accompanied by an increasingly problematic war.

Thus we saw the rise, and in fact the persistence, of conspiracy theories. I don't think it's coincidental thar Robert Kennedy Jr has endorsed at least one of them:

Robert Kennedy Jr., the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate, has backed a conspiracy theory that the CIA was involved in the killing of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, arguing the evidence is “overwhelming.”

“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder,” Kennedy said in a Sunday interview with John Catsimatidis on New York City radio station WABC 770. “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”

Well, when it looks like the Democrats may have rigged the 2020 election, in part by alleging that the loser was a Russian agent and using the organs of state security to discredit damning evidence on Hunter's laptop, and then engineered political prosecutions of the loser, what are we supposed to think? This is what happens when the consensus narrative becomes unsustainable.

Has Hunter Moved Out Of The White House?

Exactly where Hunter has been living for the past year or more hasn't been clear in any case, but common speculation had been that he'd moved into the White House sometime in 2022, at least in part to avoid legal service in his child support case with Lunden Roberts. This was settled last month, which would take away one possible reason for his extended White House stay.

On the other hand, Hunter and Joe have a strange relationship that at least outwardly looks like codependency. It appears that Hunter continues to be a key adviser to Joe, and in addition, it seems likely that he enables Joe's inflence-peddling side gig at the same time that Joe enables Hunter's drug and alcohol abuse. All things being equal, it looks like Joe would prefer to keep Hunter close at hand in the White House, while the unexplained baggie near the Situation Room (if that's where it was) suggests Hunter had worked out a modus vivendi with White House security that would accommodate his habits.

I think, though, that after the baggie episode, it was made known to Joe that there was only so much the Secret Service could do to maintain appearances. I posted here on the best explanation I've heard for the baggie: in the view of former cocaine addict and Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, someone like Hunter will leave small stashes all over the place in order to have a constant supply close at hand. I strongly suspect the Secret Service had already been finding these as a matter of routine, and it was only a uniformed officer who was out of the loop on the holiday weekend who called it in as a hazmat incident.

Thus it must have been transmitted to Joe that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened again, and while the Secret Service could claim ignorance this time, all future bets would be off. So at this point, Joe had two options: let Hunter stay on at the White House and risk more baggie discoveries that link Joe with enabling Hunter's drug use, or send Hunter back to LA again under Kevin Morris's aegis, where he seems to have been between 2019 and 2022.

I suspect this had already proven unsatisfactory by last year. Hunter had a team of Secret Service minders in the rental adjoining his own in the Malibu compound that was apparently paid for by Kevin Morris, but what we're beginning to see from last week's vignette on the balcony with the bong is that Kevin is anything but a stabilizing influence, and I've got to think that by the middle of last year, the Secret Service had made it known to Joe that Hunter was getting out of hand.

So Joe had two bad options: keep Hunter close by in the White House and risk more baggies being found, or send Hunter back to California with Kevin and risk even bigger scandals with wrecked cars and Russian hookers. I suspect the fallback plan with Kevin involves an even bigger Secret Service detail and closer escort with multiple black SUVs, but a tacit agreement to look the other way over drug deals -- in fact, I'll bet Kevin even handles those. Hookers? I imagine those can be factored in as well. Just don't let him drive, that's the big thing.

(As I've noted here frequently, Hunter's wife Melissa seems mostly out of the picture these days.)

Wednesday's court hearing in Delaware does add complications. Following Hunter's not guilty plea, the conditions of his realease require him not to use any alcohol or drugs, including marijuana, which although legal in California, is still prohibited under his conditions. In addition, he has to submit to drug tests. We don't know how strictly these will be enforced, but all of this is a risk. Even a repeat of last week's situation with Hunter visiting Kevin while Kevin went onto the balcony with a bong could now have repercussions that could put Hunter in jail.

It's hard to imagine someone like Hunter resisting the temptation to take a hit if Kevin lights up a bong while he's visiting, but even if he refrains, there's some possibility he could fail a drug test just by being in the room. But why would a "friend" like Kevin expose him to even that temptation?

It's slowly being acknowledged that the judge placing Hunter's plea deal on hold in the Delaware hearing is a major blow to Biden's reelection strategy. The whole intent was to resolve Hunter's legal issues once and for all and get them out of the way before the 2024 campaign. Now it's less likely that this will happen, while the likelihood that Hunter will do something new to get back in the news is increasing -- and the Secret Service will be right there enabling it with black SUVs.

The paparazzi have those black SUVs dialed in -- we learned that last week.

Who Blew It?

Legal commentators on the disastrous courtroom events for Hunter Biden in Delaware yesterday have avoided asking this question, but they've unavoidably skirted it by noting that plea deals aren't usually handled this way.

Normally there's just a pro forma exchange in which the judge makes sure the defendant understands the terms of the plea, and it's 15 minutes in and out. Commentators like Jonathan Turley have noted that it's basic lawyering to have the terms of the plea fully negotiated and agreed to before it reaches the court, yet somehoe this didn't take place. So who blew it? According to Politico, Hunter

was accompanied by a group of lawyers, including prominent white collar defender Abbe Lowell. Kevin Morris, a Hollywood lawyer who has reportedly given Hunter significant financial help, sat in the audience with members of his legal team.

Morris has repeatedly identified himself as Hunter's "lead attorney", and according to the UK Daily Mail,

Hunter Biden flew to his criminal court hearing in a private jet belonging to his ‘sugar brother’, according to a source and flight records.

A Dassault Falcon 50 belonging to Kevin Morris, Hunter’s lawyer and financial benefactor, flew from a Los Angeles airport to Philadelphia today, landing around 7.15pm local time, flight data shows.

A source told DailyMail.com that Morris and the First Son were on the plane.

As I noted here, Hunter was spotted visiting Morris at one of his LA area homes last Friday, when Morris was spotted huffing from a bong on the home's balcony. One can only infer that they were having a premature celebration.

On the other hand, Chris Clark was the attorney who spoke for Hunter in front of the judge. He's the gent with graying hair and a bald spot walking into the courthouse behind Hunter in the photo above. The peculiar thing about Clark is that he left the white-shoe Latham & Watkins firm only this past April in order to take on Hunter as the major client in a new firm:

Last week, leading litigator Christopher Clark left Latham & Watkins, one of Biglaw’s biggest and best names, to launch his own boutique. Together with Patrick Smith, a former colleague of his from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Rodney Villazor, another former federal prosecutor, Clark is a founding partner of Clark Smith Villazor.

For this new podcast episode, Clark and I discussed his time at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which he joined right after clerking; his time in Biglaw, including Dewey & LeBoeuf during its downfall; why he admires his most controversial client, Hunter Biden; helpful advice for representing billionaires; and, finally, a key skill for success as a lawyer—which, sadly, many lawyers overlook.

One would assume a key skill for success as a lawyer would be to be sure you have your client's plea deal nailed down in detail before you go before the judge. But beyond that, it sounds as though he and two former federal prosecutor colleagues formed a new firm primarily to defend Hunter, which maybe they thought would establish their reputation in the white collar defense world. So far, that isn't working out the way they expected. According to Yahoo,

Criminal prosection experts say that the younger Biden went from "a sweetheart deal" to a "real poison pill" that could "expose him across the board."

"The judge had an obligation to make sure that the defendant and the government have a very clear idea of what is implicated guaranteed," Jonathan Turley, criminal law professor at George Washington University, told Fox News, adding that "they didn't have that."

Turley said the plea deal dissolving in such a manor [sic] is "extremely rare" akin to "a wedding where both the groom and bride object."

Along with Bud Light and the Titan sub, this is starting to look like another episode in the crisis of competence among our Ivy-educated elites. Chris Clark has a BA from Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa and a JD from Coiumbia cum laude. Kevin Morris has a BA from Cornell and a JD from NYU. Abbe Lowell has both a BA and a JD from Columbia. Hunter Biden has a BA from Georgetown and a JD from Yale Law.

These legal minds together managed to concoct an epic debacle. My theory, though, is that Kevin Morris, who appears to have been paying all the legal bills, worked out the overall strategy, quite possibly with the help of Hunter, between hits on a bong. That's the only explanation I can think of that fits.

I'm Still Wondering About Kevin Morris's Angle

One takeaway I had from last week's case of the balcony bong was that Kevin Morris seems to own yet another house, this one a pied-a-terre on a swanky street that might be in Pacific Palisades. This is apparently in addition to his sprawling loft in Tribeca, as well as the $11 million Malibu compound that he bought from Olivia Newton-John.

Hunter Biden's Secret Service detail drives him over for casual afternoons on weed, but it pretty clearly wouldn't matter what they smoke together, because the men in the black SUV waiting outside will keep things quiet no matter what. And that's the main puzzle I have: Morris is supposed to be a rich lawyer, but it's hard to avoid thinking he's hanging with Hunter because he needs something, not least protection. Protection from what?

It has to be something important. Just yesterday, we learned that in addition to setting up the whole deal whereby Hunter would sell his paintings to unknown buyers, Morris himself bought unspecified paintings for unspecified amounts:

Hunter Biden also reportedly sold art to his top lawyer, Kevin Morris, who also paid Hunter Biden’s unpaid IRS bill of about $2 million. The entertainment lawyer is at the center of Hunter Biden’s new-found career of painting modern art, an occupation connected to the art market known for corruption.

Morris helped Hunter forge a framework to sell art to anonymous buyers through a dealer with ties to the Chinese art market. Morris was also involved in Hunter’s 2021 controversial memoir.

Nevertheless,

During a July 9, 2021, press briefing, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki addressed Hunter Biden's sale of artwork and concerns that his works may present conflicts of interest with the administration.

"After careful consideration, a system has been established that allows for Hunter Biden to work in his profession within reasonable safeguards. . . . all interactions regarding the selling of art and the setting of prices will be handled by a professional gallerist adhering to the highest industry standards, and any offer out of the normal, of course, would be rejected out of hand."

"And the gallerist will not share information about buyers or prospective buyers, including their identities, with Hunter Biden or the administration, which provides quite a level of protection and transparency," she continued.

. . . Despite the alleged safeguards, the younger Biden did ultimately learn the identity of at least two buyers, including one who donated to his father's campaign.

Further,

Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Los Angeles real estate investor and Democratic donor named to a U.S. commission, is among the buyers of novice paintings by Hunter Biden. The price: $1.3 million.

Naftali, picked by President Joe Biden to serve on a prestigious preservation commission, bought an artwork from the son of the nation’s commander in chief, the New York Post reported, citing Business Insider.

The Hunter Biden sale to a standing U.S. commissioner may have broken an “absolute wall” between President Biden’s official duties and his family’s business interests. It came to light in sales records from Hunter Biden’s art dealer, the Georges Bergès Gallery of Manhattan.

But the problem I see is that Ms Hirsh Naftali engaged in a single quid-pro-quo transaction with the Bidens, but Kevin Morris seems to have been running a good part of the whole family boodle -- he lent Hunter the money to pay his tax bill, he brokered his memoir, he set up the art sale scam, and oh by the way, he's Hunter's lead attorney in his federal tax and firearm case. So what else is there?

I'll bet there's a lot more to learn. Morris has got to want something important.

The History Channel's The FoodThat Built America Glorifies Bud Light!

The History Channel's The Food That Built America is a slick and glitzy business-school style "whig history" that covers why we have the wonderful frozen waffles, fried chicken, fast-food burgers, or packaged luncheon meats we have in this best of all possible consumer worlds. It can sometimes be vaguely informative, and even when it isn't, it gives some insight into the thought processes of the people who fancy they control the planet.

This past Sunday's episode is important for what it leaves out, since it chronicles how that wonderful product Bud Light became the top US beer, which is perfect anyhow. I'll grant that the episode must have been produced and in the can before last March, when a trans influencer singlehandedly destroyed the brand in a matter of weeks, but even if it hadn't been finished by then, that part of the story would have been so alien to the show's mission that they'd probably have had to scrap the whole episode rather than add an update.

The first part of the show covers the rise of yet another perfect, wonderful product, light beer. Philip Morris, a tobacco company, was faced with increasing regulatory limits on cigarette sales in the 1960s and decided to expand its business by buying Miller, an also-ran brewer. Philip Morris had already pioneered "light" cigarettes and was able to sell them successfully by identifying them with the macho Marlboro man, rather than trying to market any health benefits they might have.

In the process of branching into beer, they acquired another brewery that in fact produced a low-calorie beer marketed mostly toward women. That was a niche market that was going nowhere, but it also didn't taste good. Still, the Philip Morris wheels began to turn, and they decided the way to sell low-calorie beer was to call it "light", not low calorie, and imply that its main benefit was you could get more buzzed on more beer with the same amount of calories. Health had little to do with it.

Thus they made commercials with sports figures and other macho guys roaring "Tastes Great!" and "Less Filling!" According to Wikipedia,

Miller Lite was introduced nationally in 1975 and became the first successful mainstream light beer in the United States.

Miller's youth-oriented, heavy-advertising approach worked where the two previous light beers had failed, and Miller's early production totals of 12.8 million barrels quickly increased to 24.2 million barrels by 1977 as Miller rose to 2nd place in the American brewing marketplace,

Wikipedia continues,

Other brewers responded, in particular Anheuser-Busch with its heavily advertised Bud Light in 1982, which eventually overtook Lite in sales by 1994. Anheuser-Busch played on the branding style of "Lite", boasting that next to Bud Light "everything else is just a light". In 1992, light beers became the biggest domestic beer in America[.]

However, Bud Light didn't overtake Miller Lite until it decided to market to males as welL, According to The Atlantic,

A Super Bowl ad changed everything. In 1987, Anheuser-Busch made a play for younger male drinkers with a 30-second spot during the big game featuring a bull terrier named Spuds MacKenzie—“Bud Light’s original party animal!” Spuds became a pop-culture sensation, skateboarding in sunglasses and drawing the thirsty gaze of scantily clad women. “He’s Spuds MacKenzie,” the narrator of a later ad exclaimed: “One party-loving, happening dude!” . . . Spuds came to embody the fun-loving-frat-boy image that set Bud Light apart from the more staid Budweiser brand.

. . . Seven years later, in 2001, Bud Light passed Budweiser to become America’s best-selling beer, period: a staple at grocery stores and bars, a ubiquitous option at the ballpark, an entry-level lager to crush at college parties and tailgates.

This is the place where The Food That Built America ends its story. What a country! The Atlantic takes it farther:

“I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was, ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light,’” Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, told the Make Yourself at Home podcast in March. A month later, Heinerscheid was placed on leave as the company tried to control the fallout of the anti-Mulvaney boycott. Her effort to shed the company’s frat-boy image may have been too tall an order for a brand that built its empire by encouraging young men to imagine themselves as a literal horndog.

But this raises a key question. A declining top brand is still a top brand. What if Anheuser had just left Ms Heinerscheid's position vacant and decided Bud Light wasn't broken enough to try to fix? Wouldn't they have had decades of continuing profit? At this point, they'd be happy just to coast down to number two after x years without the black eye they've had from the Mulvaney fiasco. The Atlantic concludes with a shrug:

But tastes change. Schlitz was once America’s best-selling beer, and the original Budweiser’s run ended in 2001. Bud Light rose to prominence as a good-time brand that brings the party: Our beer is fun! Drink a lot of it! Today’s drinkers tend to have a more sophisticated self-conception. They also have far more options—and opinions. Beer exists in a fractious world in which anything can become ammo in the culture war, be it Disney movies or clothing at Target. No beer brand will ever be so dominant again. It’s difficult to know quite how to feel.

I'm not sure if it's that easy. By the 1960s, brewers knew you don't sell beer by marketing to women. Light beer rose to prominence by claiming to be a macho product. Suddenly a woman Harvard graduate whose appearence is calorie-conscious verging on anorexia decides the way to go is to market to guys who pretend to be skinny women. Even The Atlantic tacitly acknowledges this decision became ammo in a culture war, and that war has been a debacle.

It's probably best the History Channel could pretend it hadn't heard anything about Dylan Mulvaney. But the real history here is yet to be written.

Dylan's 15 Minutes Of Fame Are Up

Via The New York Post:

Mulvaney — who recently escaped to Peru to “feel safe” from the backlash and boycotts hounding her and the fizzling beer brand — offered up her [sic] services in an Instagram post Wednesday.

“Booking speaking opportunities for the upcoming 23/24 school year and would love to come visit,” she told her [sic] 2 million followers.

My impression of the college lecture circuit has always been that it features faded celebrities and other special pleaders past their sell-by dates. From my own time as an undergraduate in the 1960s, I remember Judy Garland (then, though still alive, largely a gay cult icon); Madalyn Murray O'Hair (prominent in the anti-school prayer movement, who quickly faded after the Supreme Court outlawed it); Immanuel Velikovsky (author of the 1950 Worlds in Collision, which argued that Biblical miracles were a misreading of astronomical catastrophes); and Michael Meeropol (son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who argued his parents had been falsely accused of espionage, something he and his brother eventually retracted in part).

According to the them website,

It’s unclear what exactly Mulvaney will be up to next. “So, right now, I’m thinking about longevity — how do I hopefully have a career that goes on for the next 40 years?” she told Them. “And how do I be happy outside of social media? Because that’s what I think I’m retraining my brain to figure out: All the other aspects of my life have to be just as important as that one.”

The overwhelming puzzle of Dylan Mulvaney is how he managed to inspire what has proven to be one of the most successful product boycotts of all time. One commentator called it not just a brand boycott, but a brand revulsion, and there's an important distinction there. A boycott is an essentially political phenomenon that may have limited short-term success. The closest example might be the boycott of Dow Chemical over napalm in the 1960s:

Dow was not known as a defense contractor — in fact, until its Pentagon contract, the business was best known for making industrial chemicals and household plastics like Saran Wrap.

But over the next few years, as Americans began seeing gruesome images of South Vietnamese children with horrific napalm burns, the antiwar movement set its sights on the company.

Activists boycotted Dow Chemical’s products, staged protests at its recruiting events on college campuses and barraged its executives with accusations of unethical war profiteering.

. . . All told, the $5 million napalm contract most likely cost Dow Chemical billions of dollars. And it was the kind of unforced error that could have been avoided if company executives had listened to early signs of opposition, done some risk analysis and changed course.

But even the emotional impact of photos showing children with napalm burns fades in comparison with images of Dylan Mulvaney that produce more like a disgust instinct that's implied in the characterization of a "brand revulsion", or the suggestion that blue-collar males now avoid drinking the brand because women will think they're gay. According to Wikipedia,

It is believed that the emotion of disgust has evolved as a response to offensive foods that may cause harm to the organism. A common example of this is found in human beings who show disgust reactions to mouldy milk or contaminated meat. Disgust appears to be triggered by objects or people who possess attributes that signify disease.

It would seem there's a great deal to be said about the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon and how it appears to have produced something like mass disgust. One thing that's clear is that after the Bud Light influencer deal, Mulvaney will never be asked to endorse another major brand.

What if he were to reflect on his situation and produce an account where he could speak with genuine insight into his experience? That might be worth hearing. Otherwise, he's still likely to cast about for something todo over the next 40 years.

A Former Addict Solves My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

Last Thursday, I posted on the details we know about the baggie of coke that was found in a cubby outside the White House Situation Room, and I concluded that nothing really fit.

Former Secret Service agents are unanimous that nobody who isn't the president, vice president, or a member of their immediate families gets into the business areas of the White House without a search, which includes metal detectors and emptying of pockets, as well as drug sniffing dogs. In other words, it's highly unlikely that either an outsider or a staff member could bring cocaine in.

On the other hand, if the suspect is a protectee, which is to say Hunter himself, the mathematics of addiction say that someone like Hunter needs a lot more than a random baggie of cocaine to satisfy his habit. He needs near-industrial quantities of coke, and it just isn't worth his trouble to smuggle in a baggie at a time; the supply is too small and unreliable.

The Secret Service people say it's the protectees who are never searched, so logically, we would expect Hunter to bring his own drugs in anyhow. Why would he need a drop at all? That just doesn't make sense.

Jesse Watters interviewed Jordan Belfort, the so-called "Wolf of Wall Street" and a former cocaine addict, on his Fox News program this past Monday evening, and as an ex-addict, he was able to clarify the potential issues surrounding Hunter's situation, while making it clear that he was speculating, and Hunter has not been tried or convicted. The Fox segment is shown via a YouTube at the top of this post, while the text quotes are from the UK Daily Mail's account of the program.

'Obviously I don't know for sure, but here's my theory,' he said. 'The obvious person to point to is Hunter Biden.

'Why? Because of the action - what people aren't focusing on is why would someone take it out of their pocket and leave it somewhere?

'The answer is because, when you're in that mindset of an addict, you want to have little 'drop points' so you can kind of sneak in, take a quick hit, leave it there for safekeeping, and come back. So it was being stored somewhere.

'In other words, you could easily keep it in your pocket and get in and out without getting detected, so the person that put it there had to be there on a consistent basis to keep using it undetected.'

So the Dan Bongino theory that I quoted last week and found implausible was that someone was bringing the cocaine in a baggie at a time and leaving it in a drop for Hunter to pick up later. Mr Belfort's theory is that Hunter has already brought a much larger quantity in and is simply secreting small amounts of it around the White House for convenience, and this cubby is one of them. This resolves my doubt about the baggie as a reliable way to smuggle the drug in from outside, and it also addresses the problem that Hunter needs a much bigger supply than baggie-level over the course of a day.

Mr Belfort also addressed the issue of whether Hunter has turned his life around, kicked his habits, and is now clean and sober.

'People don't typically stop using the drug unless they've suffered massive consequences,' he told Watters.

And this guy hasn't suffered consequences for anything - whether it's not declaring taxes, whether it's going on the board of Burisma - like why was he there? - whether it's becoming a famous artist overnight and selling scribble-scrabble for like hundreds of thousands of pounds - no consequences there.

'So why would he have stopped using drugs, I wonder, when there's no consequences?'

But this brings me back to the question of what the Secret Service knows, and the degree to which they're looking the other way over Hunter's drug use. Consider that the cubby outside the Sit Room would be just one potential spot where an addict like Hunter or Mr Belfort might secrete small amounts of a drug as a stash of convenience. In that case, when the question comes up over which location the July 2 cocaine was found -- the library, the lobby cubby, or the Sit Room cubby -- the answer might well be all of them. That could in fact have been the source of the confusion after that story broke.

This also goes to a question that came to mind after I posted on Hunter's visit with Keven Morris yesterday. I assume the Secret Service escort waited in the black SUV in which they'd driven Hunter to his "meeting" to take him back to where he was staying afterward. But in that case, even if he hadn't been smoking weed from a bong himself, he'd have been reeking of it from just being in the same room with Morris. If they had no other sign of what Hunter was up to before this, they'd have a good idea then. But this is presumably a regular detail, they know their protectee, and their protectee is regularly vioating federal law; not just cocaine, but marijuana is still illegal federally. What are their instructions?

This actually brings me to my last question: for the past several months, although nobody knows for sure, it's been more or less assumed that Hunter has been living in the White House, where he can be kept on a shorter leash. With the Sit Room episode, people like Mr Belfort are credibly inferring that under those circumstances, Hunter has been stashing cocaine all over the residence and offices to support his habit. It may well be that Joe has been getting advice that this has become unsustainable, the risk of another such discovery that might be more provably tied to Hunter is too great, and it's time for him to leave.

The trouble is that as soon as he's left -- which might be what's led to him being found smoking weed with Kevin Morris in LA -- he's going to revert to even more risky behavior like what he was doing from 2015 to 2019. For Joe, this is basically just two bad options, either drugs in the White House, or something even worse outside of it. But my bet is that a year or so ago, Hunter's minders at the Malibu compound had been warning Joe that Hunter was basically getting out of control there, which is why he was brought into the White House.

Something more is likely to break, sooner rather than later. At minimum, Kevin Morris is not the kind of guy you want Hunter hanging around with. But that brings up another question: what's in it for Kevin Morris? Running around with Hunter, at least right now, is a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone who does it. What does Kevin Morris need something like that for?

As I Suspected

Via the UK Daily Mail,

Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong.

. . . While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.

. . . It is not clear what substance was in Morris's bong, and recreational marijuana use is legal in California. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This vignette raises several important questions for me, but it begins to answer one I posed a couple of weeks ago about Hunter and Kevin:

Do they do coke together? I don't think this bodes well for Hunter's future. Kevin Morris is not a serious guy.

Bongs actually came after my time doing this sort of thing in college (which I did on and off for about 18 months but outgrew pretty quickly), when all we had was old-fashioned joints, so I went to Wikipedia for an explanation:

A bong (also known as a water pipe) is a filtration device generally used for smoking cannabis, tobacco, or other herbal substances.

Mr Morris is demonstrating its use pretty clearly in the photo. There is a large-diameter glass tube filled with water or other liquid, from which we can see him inhaling with vigor. In front of the glass tube, partly obscured by the forefinger of his right hand, is a stem loaded with cannabis. He appears to be holding a lighter in his left hand that he's using to ignite the cannabis in the stem, which in turn produces smoke that's drawn through the water in the tube and inhaled to give a euphoric effect. (But despite the Daily Mail's characterization that he "appeared relaxed", the wild-haired dude looks kinda like a hungry freak to me.)

Possession of small amounts of cannabis or marijuana for personal use is legal in California and some other states. According to writers like Alex Berenson, this has been a major public policy error, and I tend to agree. But just from watching police shows like On Patrol: Live, it appears that when people who are stopped and searched for drugs have marijuana, even in states where it's legal, they also carry other drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and fentanyl, which currently are illegal everywhere. This contributes to the impression that marijuana is a "gateway drug" that simply makes it easier to obtain and use more dangerous and illegal drugs.

This in turn leads to the perfectly reasonable question whether Mr Morris and Hunter used other drugs besides marijuana during their visit, but even if they didn't, this largely discredits the argument that Hunter has cleaned up his act and is living a life of sober respectability. If he were, it would be a major betrayal for Mr Morris to do anything that might encourage Hunter to relapse, like use drugs in his presence and in an environment where Hunter might also feel encouraged to use them. This in turn suggests that Hunter and Mr Morris mutually and cynically understand that the idea Hunter is clean and sober is for public consumption only.

But also, according to the Daily Mail link,

Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father.

Presumably Hunter is routinely tailed by paparazzi, who alerted to the black SUV and followed it to Mr Morris's place, where they got their photos and sold them to the Daily Mail. But we may surmise that the Secret Service waited around for Hunter to finish his "meeting" and drove him back to the Malibu compound or wherever else he was staying, so they must have observed just as much as the paparazzi did of Mr Morris and the bong. This in turn strongly suggests to me that the Secret Service is fully aware of Hunter's drug use and other lifestyle issues and effectively enables them -- which they've had a history of doing since Joe's time as vice president.

But finally, it's hard to avoid the impression that Mr Morris is not acting in his client's interest. According to the Daily Mail link above,

Morris is currently suing right wing nonprofit Marco Polo and its founder, former Donald Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler, who has been investigating the Biden family.

The attorney accused Ziegler and his nonprofit of harassment, invasion of privacy and 'criminal impersonation' in court documents filed in Los Angeles.

But Morris himself is acting in a way that damages Hunter's reputation, by portraying him as someone who is present when drugs are used -- and in fact, in the deal that Hunter agreed to for his firearm charge, for which Mr Morris was lead attorney,

Hunter Biden also has agreed to enter into a so-called pretrial diversion agreement in connection with a federal felony charge of possession of a gun by a person who is a user or addict of illegal drugs, according to the filing by prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Typically, such agreements call for the related criminal charge to be dismissed if a defendant complies with the conditions of the deal for a set period of time.

Those conditions would normally include abstaining from any drug or alcohol use -- but Mr Morris is by his own actions suggesting he won't encourage Hunter to take this seriously.

Well, prolonged cannabis use affects overall judgment. I disagree with the media accounts that call Kevin Morris a "legal heavyweight". He's just an entitled a stoner with more money than brains.

Maybe They Have A Point

In a post last week, I said I was skeptical of reports that some Democrats are trying to find a younger candidate who can replace Joe Biden as their 2024 nominee because, as I said at that time, Joe Biden is their only hope of claiming to maintain the nearly expired New Deal coalition. In fact, it seems to me that if they want a viable national candidate who could actually do this, they have a perfectly good one in Robert Kennedy Jr, whom they currently abjure.

This isn't to say that they don't see a legitimate problem in Biden, although yet again, I don't think a medical diagnosis is needed to point it out. Take his meeting with Israel's President Herzog at the White House Tuesday, where he's reported to have said,

“The Israelis and the Palestinians… uh… on a political level… They uh, and… uh… They uh… And, I… Agwai endhole and whole shegwam… And uh…” said Biden.

The fact-checkers insisted that the big guy wasn't asleep, he was just reading from notes in his lap, but that didn't excuse his detached, offhand, garbled delivery.

Or take his Philadelphia speech yesterday:

“How many times you read in inflat—that a recession’s comin’?” Biden said in garbled fashion. “They’ven wall street today said no you’ll don’t say resheck comin’ now!”

I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that isn’t what it said on the teleprompter. . . . I tip my hat to the folks at the Townhall Twitter account for that translation because that certainly had to be a bit of a challenge.

The commentator goes on to wonder if Biden might even be having a stroke, but again, this needs a medical diagnosis that neither he nor I is qualified to give. I think a more likely explanation is suggested by this story from Politico on Tuesday:

President Joe Biden will make his longtime residence of Wilmington, Del., the headquarters of his 2024 campaign, he announced Tuesday.

“My family’s values, my eternal optimism and my unwavering belief in the American middle class as our nation’s backbone comes from my home — from Delaware,” Biden said in a statement.

Insofar as there's been comment about this at all, it's taken as an indication he expects to run the same sort of "front porch" campaign he ran in 2020, although even then, his actual campaign headquarters was in Philadelphia. It seems to me that given his character -- he's lazy, grandiose, and entitled (I don't need to be a medical professional to say this) -- this is a fully consistent strategy for him to take, and it's consistent with the attitude we saw in the recent public appearances I cited above.

As for his photo op with Isaac Herzog, it's indisputable that Herzog was there as a supplicant, and Biden's delivery and overall demeanor brutally reinforced this. Biden, after all, is the most powerful man in the world, he's fully aware of it, and dealing with supplicants, especially an Isreali supplicant, is an annoyance. His handlers have already made all the policy decisions, he's already signed whatever they've told him to sign, and his presence in the Oval Office is entirely pro forma. Get it over with, it's a big waste of time.

He reinforces this with a heavy-lidded lack of affect as he ostentatiusly gives a garbled reading from notes in his lap. He's neither sick nor senile, he's just incredibly bored. At his Philadelphia appearance, according to RedState,

After the story that broke over the past day about his staff having to make “accommodations” for his issues, Biden came trotting out, trying to look vigorous. But then he kind of blew that immediately, by then stopping suddenly, throwing his arms up, and telling someone up in one of the seats, “Don’t jump!” — that weird thing that he keeps doing.

As I've been saying all along, Biden sees himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations. With moves like that, he's simply flipping the bird to his own staff, who apparently urge him not to say all those dumb things. He'll say what he pleases, he'll do what he pleases, and he'll wander off the stage as he pleases, godammit. He'd just as soon be home in Wilmingon; this other stuff is a waste of his valuable time.

What may be bothering the Democrats who're trying to find a better candidate most isn't a possible medical condition, it's that Joe is conscious, aware of his environment, and making fully informed decisions based on his own appraisal, however cynical, of the political circumstances. As far as I can see, he doesn't think much has effectively changed since 2020, and he's simply going to repeat his 2020 stategy. I have a feeling that the Dunning-Kruger effect will be validated here, probably sooner than later.

I suppose if I were a Democrat strategist, I'd be nervous, too -- but what can they change?

Here's My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

I certainly agree that the unanswered question of who brought the baggie into the cubby outside the Sit Room is important, but I'm less and less convinced the answer has much to do with Hunter. Let's take the latest theory from Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who's been serving as the vehicle for unnamed colleagues still on the force who are expressing their skepticism about the investigation. As of Tuesday, he was saying:

“Let’s just say a friend called me up and said, ‘Don’t preclude the possibility that the cocaine found in the White House there was not accidentally left behind.’ In other words, it was left there deliberately for someone to find, and let you say someone else may have found it. So that’s the story I kind of heard from someone who may know a little something about something. We’ll see what happens, but they know who it is. I’m sure of it.”

As best I can translate this, he seems to be saying that the baggie was something like a dead drop, a dealer or some intermediary left the baggie in a place where its intended recipient could find it, and the drop somehow went awry until the uniformed officers found it on a routine search that Sunday night.

But that theory goes only so far. According to ABC News reporting on the Secret Service briefing to Congress, Rep. Tim Burchett said the bag contained less than a gram of cocaine. But every indication we have is that Hunter has been a longtime addict, and he failed a drug test in the Navy as of October 2014.

Much more recent photos that I covered in this post appear to show Hunter snorting at public White House events. Both his long history with drugs and the apparent frequency of his use suggests he's a confirmed addict, and this means he needs much more than just a small bag containing less than a gram to get through the day. According to this site, "Though people use Cocaine at different rates depending on their addiction and tolerance to its effects, consistent users usually use up to 5 grams per day."

So a random dead drop of a single baggie doesn't seem reasonable for someone who likely needs as many as five of those baggies a day, or 35 a week. But if, as is generally speculated, Hunter is currently living at the White House, or at least is there pretty frequently, he would need a delivery system that's much more reliable and capable of supplying a much more significant amount. So on one hand, I don't think the baggie outside the Sit Room had anything to do with Hunter. On the other, we've got the question of how a much larger quantity must in fact be finding its way to him.

I'm surprised that nobody is probing Dan Bongino over this question. He can't be that naive about how much cocaine an addict like Hunter uses and how a single baggie in a dead drop won't suit the purpose. But at the same time, every indication we have is that Hunter indulges all his vices on an industrial scale, to the point that his Secret Service bodyguards must be fully aware of what he's up to, and that's got to be well beyond a baggie in a cubby now and then.

In fact, I don't see how the Secret Service Biden family detail can't be directly enabling Hunter's vices. But nobody's passing the word about this to Bongino? That just doesn't fit. Either Bongino is completely out of the loop, or he isn't telling the full story.

This brings me to yesterday's hearing at the House Oversight Committee, in which Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene discussed evidence showing Hunter purchased an airplane ticket for a supposed "paralegal" to travel to Los Angeles and back to have sex with him, paid for with law firm funds. (I believe this is the series of episodes from late 2018 and early 2019 covered in this story at the UK Daily Mail.)

This level of vice becomes an ingrained habit. The semi-official line is that once Hunter married Melissa Cohen in the spring of 2019, he got clean, changed his ways, and has become a model of filial respectability, but this is hard to believe, especially since he's so seldom seen with Melissa these days, especially in the White House, and this brings up the question of how he satisfies his other industrial-level vices and how this relates to his status as a Secret Service protectee.

According to the Secret Service website, protectees include the President and Vice President of the United States and their immediate families, which includes Hunter.

Permanent protectees, such as the president and vice president, have special agents permanently assigned to them. . . . Protection for the President and Vice President of the United States is mandatory. All other individuals entitled to our protection may decline security if they choose.

The protection of an individual is comprehensive and goes well beyond surrounding the individual with well-armed agents. As part of our mission of preventing an incident before it occurs, we rely on meticulous advance work and threat assessments to identify potential risks to protectees.

It isn't entirely clear whether Hunter can selectively decline security, but especially if he's in residence at the White House, we've got to assume the Secret Service is fully aware of whom he's seeing, where he's going, who's visiting, and what they're all up to. At least in 2018 and 2019, this included violation of federal law, the Mann Act. Whether or not Hunter was an official protectee at a given time, we know there appears to have been a Secret Service network throughout this period that was doing cleanup work over things like his wrecked rental car in Arizona (fall 2016) and the firearm in the Wilmington dumpster (October 2018). There's never been a satisfactory explanation for either of these episodes.

As far as I can see, the Secret Service has been aware of Hunter violating federal law while Joe was vice president, in the interregnum when Joe was out of office between 2017 and 2021, and as best we can infer, while he's president now -- and beyond that, not just aware of it, but enabling it. Somebody needs to get real and tell Bongino to put up or shut up.

Bp Barron's Favorite Television Show

Ever since Bp Robert Barron heartily endorsed this past spring's TV series Mrs Davis, calling it "my favorite show", I've been anxious to watch it. Nevertheless, although he's discussed it in at least two podcasts, and on one, his interlocutor warns viewers that there are content issues and "don't show it to your prayer group", I can agree that it isn't a Catholic film. He says at the link,

Now if you’re looking to Mrs. Davis for theological precision, you will be severely disappointed (and please don’t write me letters reminding me of how weird its theology is; I know), but there is indeed a spiritual motif of supreme importance that stands at the very heart of the show, and it is well worth plowing through all of the intense oddness to grasp it. It has to do with idolatry and, more precisely, with our tendency to create idols.

Wikipeida calls it "an American science fiction comedy drama", which puts it in the same genre as one of my all-time favorites, Fringe, but I think there's one important difference. In Fringe, the FBI has established a special unit to investigate paranormal phenomena, in the course of which it is forced to spirit a disgraced Harvard professor who is a hybrid of Timothy Leary and Ted Kaczynski out of a mental institution to solve the scientific issues involved.

While there are tensions between Dr Walter Bishop and Supervisory Special Agent Phillip Broyles, briliantly played by the late Lance Reddick, Broyles is an experienced operator within the FBI bureaucracy, and he is able, despite Bishop's bizarre eccentricities, to work within the system to accomplish the overall goal of protecting society from paranormal threats. As such, the comedy's happy endings always reinforce the benignity of the established order, including the FBI and its corporate and political contollers.

The imaginative universe in Mrs Davis is of a different sort, much harder to characterize or clearly define. For starters, there is no ontological Satan, which is a product of the show's weird theology, which Bp Barron clearly understands. Sister Simone, the main character, consults with Jay, as well as the Virgin Mary, who is Jay's mother, but even for them, the universe is out of joint -- in one episode, Jay is preoccupied with fixing a leak that's flooding heaven, which he isn't quite able to control, but there doesn't seem to have been a war in heaven that might have caused it, nor an overriding plan that subordinates it in the scheme of things.

This is a fundamental difference between Mrs Davis and Fringe. Beyond science fiction comedy, I would call Mrs Davis neo-noir, which Fringe is not. It has more in common with the Jason Bourne trilogy, in which the CIA and other organs of state security have been deeply compromised, and Jason himself must undertake an inchoate hero's quest to defeat them and discover his own identity. As such, this fits the Wikipedia definition of neo-noir, "blurring of the lines between good and bad and right and wrong, and thematic motifs including revenge, paranoia, and alienation."

Why should something like this appeal to a generally middle-of-the-road, almost popularizing, Roman Catholic bishop, theologian, and evangelist, who indeed points out the major heterodox and syncretistic elements in the film? At the link, he explains, Mrs Davis is "a massively powerful internet algorithm, an artificial intelligence that basically knows all that can be known and that can order and manipulate human beings at will."

But Simone has intuited that Mrs. Davis, in point of fact, robs people of their independence, saps them of their energy and creativity, controls them ruthlessly, and finally dispenses with them when they no longer suit her purpose. She has come to see, to state it bluntly and simply, that the algorithm is an idol, a pathetic simulacrum of the true God, something that we have made that has come, like Frankenstein’s monster, to terrorize us.

There are gems throughout the film. Early on, Wiley, Simone's former boyfriend, realizes that Simone has allowed Mrs Davis to send her on a quest for the Holy Grail, which Simone nevertheless expects to use to destroy the algorithm. Wiley says basically, "She's sending you on a hero's quest. That's a cliche. Algorithms love cliches." In another sequence, a professsor, Dr Arthur Schrodinger, is annoyed by colleagues who keep giving him kitschy cat bric-a-brac. This sort of thing makes the film delicious, just as much as Fringe. There are extensive references to both Moby Dick and Jonah and the Whale, which sent me right back to Melville. What Bp Barron thinks redeems the film is this:

When the monks and hermits of late antiquity took to the hills, escaping from the dying civilization of Rome, respectable people thought they had lost their minds. Most of the denizens of the Mrs. Davis universe feel the same way about Sr. Simone and her community: Why would anyone want to operate outside the ambit of a force so benevolent? Could I make a suggestion? Take a look at your phone and find out how much screen time you put in last week, and then ask yourself honestly how much of your thinking and behavior was determined by that little machine.

I note via the Wikipedia link that it's been announced there won't be another season for Mrs Davis, so the story arc and the metaphorical structure are complete. It's now possible to order the full season on DVD via eBay, which is what I did. The film is worthwhile fun.

Back To The Center Of Attention

Via The Washington Examiner,

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer turned transgender activist Lia Thomas is back at the center of attention after the national champion was seen on social media appearing to embrace the "Trantifa" movement.

Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female, was seen on Instagram sporting an all-black outfit that included a BDSM leather harness and shirt reading "Antifa Super Soldier."

The image of Thomas was reportedly shared by the activist's partner Gwen Weiskopf, who purportedly identifies as transgender.

So who is Gwen Weiskopf? A quick web search brought up this photo and a writeup:

At the link:

[D]etails on Lia Thomas and Gwen Weiskopf’s relationship timeline & their dating history still need to be published in the public domain.

However, sources believe the couple is still together despite Lia’s name beginning to trend over the internet after participating in female swinging despite being transgender.

So by the accounts of the female swimmers on the Penn swim team, Lia is an intact biological male who claims to be "transgender", whatever that means, but is also conventionally attracted to women, and Ms Weiskopf appears to be an intact biological female, at least judging by facial features and the proportion of her hands. So I'm wondering if the whole Lia saga has been nothing more than an elaborate windup in the UK sense, an extended joke. If Ms Weiskopf claims to be "transgender" as well, then they amount to a conventionally cisgender couple who are just appropriating trans status for attention and privilege.

But this brought me to another question, now that notionally "trans" figures like Dylan Mulvaney and Sam Brinton have been in the public eye: can you make a career out of being trans? It looks like Lia is trying to rebrand himself as being more generally "transgressive", as opposed to just transsexual, posing as an “Antifa Super Solder” in bondage-style leather gear.

Sam Brinton has also been back in the news:

Sticky-fingered former Department of Energy employee Sam Brinton was on a taxpayer-funded work trip when they snatched a woman’s suitcase from a Las Vegas airport, documents obtained by The Post show.

Federal funds paid for non-binary Brinton, who uses they/them pronouns, to head to the city as a representative for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy in July 2022, according to internal expense reports provided to The Post by the federal watchdog Functional Government Initiative (FGI).

Although Brinton has a master's degree in the nuclear waste field, he built his working career largely on gay and trans activism within scientific fields, which culminated in his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, which lasted fully six months until his arrests for stealing luggage from airport carousels. During this period, he also had a side gig hosting spanking seminars at kink conferences, and it would appear that if his guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges for two prior thefts won't end his nuclear career, which requires a security clearance, pending felony charges for a third theft almost certainly will, and his future prospects are likely to involve headining kink conferences.

But this brings me to my favorite question: what problem are Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney trying to solve? They present themselves as trans activists, but they also stand for a principle that goes beyond just the problem of sexual preference -- and at least in the case of Lia Thomas, his day-to-day sexual preference is simply irrelevant. He identifies as trans even if he's apparently in a conventional long-term relationship with a woman and dates other women as well. This piece by radical feminist author Angela Saini explains the real issue:

I think the fight for transgender rights and non-binary rights is an anti-patriarchal fight, because gendered oppression flattens people and expects you to follow certain rules, which disadvantages everybody who doesn’t conform to that system. So we have to see it all as intrinsic. The anti-transgender movement in the US mainly is associated with religious conservatives, and that’s true in many other parts of the world, like Eastern Europe for example.

I find it bizarre that, in the UK, it’s associated with a certain section of feminists. I don’t know how that has happened. I really hope that we can reach a point at which we understand and accommodate the fact that we cannot wish people away. What happens at the administrative level and institutional level is a problem we have created because we’ve created our institutions in such a binary way. If we hadn’t created them in such a binary way we wouldn’t be in as much of a mess as we’re in right now. What you have to ultimately accept is that space needs to be made for everyone. We need to make everyone feel comfortable and safe in society – and surely that’s something we can all get behind.

The problem is that guys wearing lipstick and dresses or swimming on the women's team turn out to be just a totem for the bigger issue, which is the need to eliminate "certain rules" that "flatten people". The rules extend beyond conventional gender roles to questions like traditional respect for the rule of law, the role of logic and grammar in clear expression, or even the use of mathematics as a broad tool for understanding the everyday environment. Eliminating principles like these, which basically comprise "natural law", is the object of "smashing the patriarchy".

My question about people like Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney is how they can support themselves under the general principles of natural law -- they have to live out a normal lifespan and earn a living that will keep them comfortable. Leaving everything else aside, they're going to get old, and they're going to fade quickly from media. Can they cancel out that rule? I'm sure they'd like to. But things like Lia Thomas's phony claims of "trans" privilege are transparent. You can't cancel natural law, and to the extent that "patriarchy" is a reference to millennia of human experience about how the world runs, you can't smash it.

Kamala Goes There

There's been a minor flurry over Vice President Harris's latest blurt:

The shocking gaffe happened as the 58-year-old vice president delivered remarks at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Md., on the need to build a “clean energy economy.”

“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” Harris said, eliciting applause from the audience.

While according to the link, the White House said she meant to say "pollution" instead of "population", it's hard not to think this was more than a Freudian slip, and she could arguably have meant what she said. A web search on "climate change population reduction" produces 185,000,000 hits, including many sites at the most respectable NGOs expressing quite radical proposals in ways that make them seem like bromides. Just this past May, an article in Scientific American by Stephanie Feldstein, the population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, argues

While many assume population decline would inevitably harm the economy, researchers found that lower fertility rates would not only result in lower emissions by 2055, but a per capita income increase of 10 percent.

Lower fertility rates also typically signal an increase in gender equality. Better-educated women tend to have fewer children, later in life. This slows population growth and helps reduce carbon emissions. And when women are in leadership roles, they’re more likely than men to advance initiatives to fight climate change and protect nature. These outcomes are side effects of policies that are necessary regardless of their impact on population.

. . . Population decline is only a threat to an economy based on growth. Shifting to a model based on degrowth and equity alongside lower fertility rates will help fight climate change and increase wealth and well-being.

But at least for now, world population is still increasing, not declining. The link suggests it's projected to peak at around 10.4 billion in 2086, but this is just a projection, and people like Ms Feldstein are concerned that we're losing biodiversity now. In addition, this review of the traditional "population control" theory suggests it was originally driven by Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb. but

Population control finally met its formal end in 1994 at a ­UN-­sponsored conference in Cairo. In what is now called the “Cairo Consensus,” 162 states rejected the use of population targets as well as the incentives and disincentives used to reach them[.]

Nevertheless,

enthusiasm for the old ideas hasn't died. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, a leader of the campaign to “make poverty history” and combat global warming by implementing a crash program to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, has cited “population control” as a model, calling it “one of the great success stories of modern times.” Sachs says he favors purely voluntary methods, but he and his allies are playing with a dangerous formula. Declaring a “global crisis” can attract media attention and don­ors.

And the link is talking exclusively about the 20th century Malthusian link between population and world poverty; it has nothing to say about the renewed movement that links not just "population control" but "population decline" with new concepts like "biodiversity" and "equity". The Wikipedia link on Sustainable population summarizes current views from this movement on the optimal world population level:

Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on. Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population tend to put forward much lower numbers, between 2 and 4 billion. Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion. Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices. Other estimates of a sustainable global population also come in at considerably less than the current population of 8 billion.

But given the typical climate-change predictions we see now that claim the polar ice caps will melt and Miami will be under water within the next ten years, how much time do we have to fix things? Will electric cars be enough? The link above suggests the 20th century efforts at population control via voluntary sterilization and mass birth control were ineffective, and here we are at eight billion heading for ten. So how do we get back to ten or 20 percent of that before we all drown? It sounds to me as though even the world envisioned by Kurt Vonnegut would be insufficient to solve this problem: the government runs ethical suicide parlors

and urges people to commit suicide to help keep the population of 17 billion stable. . . . The government also suppresses the population's sexual desire with a drug that numbs them from the waist down (but does not render them infertile, as that is seen as unethical and in violation of the religious principles of many).

In fact, the pioneering efforts of the National Socialists at a point-based Final Solution would be laughably inadequate to reduce the world population to just two or three billion before the planet burns up. But this in turn raises the question of just who needs to be culled if we undertake a project at this scale -- after all, it's white people who got us into this mess. Maybe the National Socialists had a point, huh? But we'd need to take their efforts much farther.

Republicans really need to pursue this, particularly because Ms Harris would be incapable of handling any questions about this issue overall in a debate, or even in an apostrophe from someone like Tucker Carlson. Even a blanket assertion that she'd simply meant to say "pollution" instead of "population" would be damaging enough.