In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

So far, I think the best single source on the Washington, DC collision of a regional jet and an Army helicopter is the YouTube updates by longtime pilot Juan Browne on his blancolirio channel. I linked his first one in yesterday's post. Embedded above is an update from yesterday afternoon. I'll refer to several other sources that tend to confirm or expand his views in this post as well. It's worth noting that American Airlines CEO Robert Isom iossued a preliminary statement at a press conference yesterday , “At this time, we don’t know why the military aircraft came into the path of the PSA aircraft,” Isom said at a Thursday morning press conference. Isom said in a staff note Thursday that the National Transportation Safety Board would be the “sole source of truth going forward, and accuracy is of the utmost importance.” PSA Airlines is an American Airlines subsidiary and one of its regional carriers. American Eagle is how American Airlines brands its regiona...

NOW — Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy: “Whether it was air traffic control, whether it was military aircraft, helicopters or the American flight, everything was standard in the lead up to the crash … Something happened here.” pic.twitter.com/ojRVAf34ZO — Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 30, 2025 A YouTube commentator that I trust on aviation matters, Juan Browne on the blancolirio channel, a working airline pilot with both military and civilian experience, has a good video with graphics. At 0:50, he says, . . . the [Regional Jet] flies the approach to this Runway, 1, the long runway, and then sidesteps around here to a left dogleg entry to Runway 33, the relatively short runway at about 5200 feet long here at Washington DC, a very demanding approach. This crew is focused on this approach. This midair collision occurred just below 400 feet above the ground. The National Guard helicopter, believed to be eithet as UH60 or VH60, was presumably operating out of Joint Base B...

I ran across this video by a UK YouTuber that gives an entertaining perspective on Trump;s current effort to buy Greenland. The key takeaway is that acquiring Greenland has been a US strategic objective since 1867, when Secretary of State William H Seward attempted to purchase it from Denmark along with his purchase of Alaska from Russia. (He also wanted to buy Canada from the UK.) According to Wikipedia , Since the 19th century, the United States has considered, and made, several attempts to purchase the island of Greenland from Denmark, as it did with the Danish West Indies in 1917. Internal discussions within the United States government about acquiring Greenland notably occurred in 1867, 1910, 1946, 1955, 2019 and 2025 and acquisition has been advocated by American secretaries of state William H. Seward and James F. Byrnes, privately by vice president Nelson Rockefeller, and publicly by president Donald Trump, among others. After World War II, the United States secretly o...

Catholic Charities shocking video instructing Illegals on how to avoid ICE. You tax dollars fund this sh*t. They receive millions in Government grants. pic.twitter.com/LtG0OLGYwr — Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) January 27, 2025 Via Catholic News Agency: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on Sunday argued that its long-standing refugee program is a “work of mercy” after Vice President JD Vance criticized the bishops’ positions on immigration issues.' . . . The USCCB on Sunday argued that its own work with refugees is part of a “long history” of Catholic advocacy for vulnerable migrants. “In 1980, the bishops of the United States began partnering with the federal government to carry out this service when Congress created the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP),” the bishops said in the statement, which did not mention Vance. “Every person resettled through USRAP is vetted and approved for the program by the federal government while outside of the U...

I found a surprisingly even-handed story on Vice President Vance's exchange with Margaret Brennan on yesterday's Face the Nation that covered, in part, the USCCB's condemnation of Trump's immigration-related executive orders, at America magazine. The full interview is embedded above. The America piece reports, In Vance’s first interview since becoming vice president, host Margaret Brennan noted that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops “condemned” Trump’s immigration-related executive orders, and asked Vance, “Do you personally support the idea of conducting a raid or enforcement action in a church service, at a school?” “Of course, if you have a person who is convicted of a violent crime, whether they’re an illegal immigrant or a non-illegal immigrant, you have to go and get that person to protect the public safety. That’s not unique to immigration,” he said. “But let me just address this particular issue,” he continued. “Because as a practicin...

The most succinct comment on Trump's first week was from Greg Gutfeld, who said Trump shows the difference between a "real president and a cardboard prop". Yesterday I called him a Republican president with industrialist, federalist, reconstructionist, even partly Catholic leanings, thinking in particular of Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, and Roosevelt. Although comparisons of Trump with Theodore Roosevelt are easy, before this past week, I thought more of Grant. Via Wikipedia , In 1885, impoverished and dying of throat cancer, Grant wrote his memoirs, covering his life through the Civil War, which were posthumously published and became a major critical and financial success. At his death, Grant was the most popular American and was memorialized as a symbol of national unity. Due to the pseudohistorical and negationist mythology of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy spread by Confederate sympathizers around the turn of the 20th century, historical assessments and ran...

As I had hoped, a visitor set me straight on the question of the Anglican vestments at the National Cathedral post-inaugural prayer service: I'm not sure that they are "black stoles" but, rather, "scarves." The stole as a liturgical vestment was discarded in the Church of England at the Reformation and did not return until the Oxford Movement, and that unofficially and indeed, arguably, illegally. Nor were the traditional Catholic liturgical colors for vestments preserved after the English Reformation; they, too, came back with the Oxford Movement. The same was the case in the Episcopal Church, although their restoration to use in some circles in PECUSA met with less violent and less prolonged opposition in the former, than it did in the Church of England (among Evangelicals especially). In both the CofE and PECUSA the wearing of such post-Reformation style of vestments tended to hang on in cathedrals and especially big public services of a politica...

In Wednesday's post, I noted that the clergy presiding over the post-inaugural prayer service for Trump's second inauguration wore black stoles. This puzzled me, because I was an Episcopalian for over 30 years, and I've been a Roman Catholic for a dozen, and the liturgical colors for The Episcopal Church follow those of the Catholic Church. The current Catholic liturgical season is "Ordinary Time", for which the color is green. The Episcopal Church regards this season as an extended "Epiphany" that lasts until Ash Wednesday, but its liturgical color is also green. Thus a priest or deacon presiding over a normal eucharist or prayer service at this time of the year would wear a green stole, not a black one, and black isn't normally listed as a liturgical color -- just red, white, purple, rose, or green. According to Wikipedia , in Roman Catholic practice, which Episcopalians have followed since the Oxford Movement, For the celebrati...

Via the UK Daily Mail , Kamala Harris was all smiles and affection for her 'beloved' second gentleman Doug Emhoff in the immediate aftermath of her crushing presidential election defeat. But now that President Donald Trump has been sworn into office, for sore loser Harris, it is now all about the blame game, and her target has flipped to her 'dead weight' husband. And as she weighs her political future – maybe a 2026 run for Governor of California or another try for the nation's top job two years later – she has to consider whether Emhoff is an asset or a liability. . . . Despite their brave united front at the inauguration and at President Jimmy Carter's January 9 funeral, those close to the couple believe all is not 'hunky dory' between them. And word is the husband of California girl Kamala has already signed up for a job with a Big Apple law firm which would require them to split their time between New York and Los Angeles. The...

The intgriguing thing about Episcopalian Bishop Marianne Budde's homily at yesterday's National Prayer Service is how many people it confused. Just for starters, DeVory Darkins, the YouTube commentator in the clip above, says at 2:35, I didn't know you could be a bishop as a woman, I'm just being honest here, I'm not too familiar with the Catholic religion, I'm a Christian. . . The commenters quickly explained that Bp Budde isn't Catholic, she's Episcopalian -- but nevertheless, aren't the Episcopalians hitchhiking once again on Catholic prestige here? She's vested in a strange mishmosh of a surplice-cum-black-stole that's at least reminiscent of Catholic tradition, and the service is conducted in a faux Catholic-style cathedral with faux medieval stonework and a rose window, which calls itself the National Cathedral. Wikipedia says , The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington, comm...

According to Joel Kotkin, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass “is a dead woman walking”, as a union organiser friend told me this week. The revelations of incompetence, poor planning, and awful communication, combined with the fact that the LA mayor was partying in Ghana when wildfires started in her city, have worked against her, and yesterday angry protestors gathered outside her home. Some charges made by Donald Trump and Elon Musk tying the disaster to DEI and climate policies are exaggerated. But Bass’s lack of interest in public safety mirrors the new progressive script which prioritises “social justice” over actual justice, racial quotas over merit, and climate alarmism over common sense. I'm not so sure about this. The Eaton Fire, one of the two that dominated last week's news, was entirely outside the LA city limits. The Palisades Fire, though, was mainly within city limits, but the part within city limits was Pacific Palisades : If you were meeting a talent ma...

A second California fire that's been edged out of the news by the ones in the Los Angeles area is a fire at a battery storage facility at Moss Landing near Monterey on the Central Coast. The site's battery energy storage facility is the largest commercial battery energy storage facility in the world. The energy storage facility stores excess daytime electrical energy for later use during periods of lower electricity production (usually at night.) Such excess energy is typically produced by renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. . . . Utilities in California are required by a 2013 law to provide significant battery storage by 2024. The Moss Landing Power Plant site has since been chosen as California's primary location to provide battery based energy storage in order to better utilize renewable energy sources such as solar and wind on a grid-wide commercial scale. On June 29, 2018 Vistra Corp announced that it planned on building at the Moss Landing Powe...

Speaker Mike Johnson reveals just how out of the loop and cognitively impaired Joe Biden was as President after meeting with Biden and discussing his LNG Executive Order: “Biden was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed.” Scary. pic.twitter.com/Clbytug8e3 — Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 18, 2025 All of a sudden, Speaker Mike Johnson and Democrat Leader Schumer are getting in line to say they knew all along that Joe wasn't running on all cylinders. This suggests to me that even more will be coming out as Trump's staff gains access to White House records, but it's nevertheless significant that the House Speaker and then-Senate Majority Leader were aware of serious problems with Joe's ability to perform his duties but nevertheless did nothing, at least partly because they currently have no constitutional ability to initiate any sort of action. Sen Schumer is now trying to cover himself by claiming he met with Joe on July 13 of last year, j...