In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As far as I can tell, the only White House response to the terrible debacle in Kabul over the weekend was to issue an updated verson of the Camp David photo I posted yesterday, showing Biden in a different outfit in the empty room, looking bemused instead of defeated. From various reports, he will address the nation "soon", "at the right time", or "in a few days", but there hasn't even been a peep on Twitter since Saturday. It's perhaps even more intriguing that his chief flack, Ms Psaki, is nowhere to be found : Fox News reported late Sunday night that Psaki “is taking a break from her duties” while pretty much everyone questions “the silence of President Joe Biden.” When Fox’s Micheal Lee attempted to make contact with Psaki multiple times via email on Sunday, he was sent an autoreply “out of office” message. Psaki apparently won’t be returning calls until August 23rd, or approximately three days after our last local friend or military con...

If I try to get an idea of how the lizard people meant to game out a post-2020 strategy, I can come up with only an inchoate notion that there would be some type of master reset sustained by media consensus and having both legislative houses and the executive in the hands of the Democrats. Then there would be a series of woke reforms, including defunding police, forgiving student debt, bullet trains, largesse for the Lumpenproletariat , and whatever else. A glimmer of difficulty arose fairly early in this phase when it began to be recognized that the 2022 election would still be held, and the Great Realignment would be enacted only through the slimmest congressional majorities, which would be threatened in the off-year election. Among other things, the initial post-2020 fantasy envisioned eliminating the Senate filibuster, which proved not to be attainable, and that forced a dial-back of other priorities. Thus at this point, much more aware that the 2022 election would likely clo...

The only context I have for this is remarks by Dan Bongino last year: Former Secret Service Agent and conservative pundit Dan Bongino has declared that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is suffering rapid “cognitive decline," according to sources who are "close to the situation." . . . . Breitbart News reported. "Not a joke and not hyperbole – I’m hearing from people close to the situation that Biden’s cognitive decline is rapidly worsening and is becoming increasingly difficult to mask," Bongino wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday morning. The strong implication seems to be that Bongino's sources are former colleagues in the Secret Service, who would be in the position of routinely trying to shepherd Biden through awkward moments like those caught here. The body language of the agents in the clip suggests they're working hard to maintain a professional detachment and respect for the office, but I also have the impression that this is a ...

As of yesterday, our intrepid public health authority Dr Walensky was complaining about how nobody took her seriously or something . “I am really struggling with how to communicate to people who are worried about politics, and I just want them to continue to be at their family’s dinner table,” Dr. Walensky told the Wall Street Journal. [Family dinner table? Wha?] “My job is to put my head down, ignore the criticism and do the right thing for the public and to do the right thing for health.” The Journal noted that patients Walensky has treated in the past are “generally” trusting of her advice but as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “she has learned the same isn’t always true of many people in the U.S.” . . . Walensky’s mistrust comes as White House officials are reportedly frustrated by the CDC’s lack of coronavirus data transparency. “Top Biden officials are growing frustrated with the lack of internal visibility into data being collected by...

A couple of data points puzzle me about the California recall election's progress. The first is that by July 29, there were two polls in quick succession that showed growing sentiment among likely voters to recall Gov Newsom. Since then -- fully two weeks later -- there's been nothing. This is a rapidly developing story, with the September 14 election little more than a month away, and nobody's releasing polls. In fact, we received our own mail-in ballots in yesterday's mail, something the state is doing for every voter in this election. This means that voting is already under way. The top Republican candidates are actively campaigning via ads on Facebook and elsewhere. But Newsom, who has raised more than $58 million to defeat the recall , three times as much as all his opponents combined, is far less visible than Elder, Cox, and the other Republicans. Elder in particular is able to leverage appearances on Fox News and elsewhere to get free coverage, but New...

Well, right up to his resignation, a lot of the smart money said Cuomo would pull a Clinton, keep denying he-said-she-said allegations and hold on until the thing blew over. But Clinton was Br'er Rabbit; Cuomo pulled a Nixon, turning a stubborn countenance to the world and finally collapsing in disgrace. But there was a subtext to Nixon, too. Nixon's ultimate sin was not letting his aides bungle the Watergate fiasco. His sin was Alger Hiss. The lizard people have a long memory. When I posted on Cuomo's problems last week , I raised questions that have also turned up in independent media: ultimately, Cuomo was accused of run-of-trhe mill offenses: "non-consensual touching" and "sexist remarks" leading to a "hostile work environment". Forget Clinton, Biden is on film doing the same frat-boy stuff, in full view and far more often. Nobody brings this up any more, because it won't go anywhere. The other objection is that Cuom...

I posted yesteday about the imprecise language Drs Fauci and Walensky use in discussing COVID. In one sentence on last Sunday's talks, Dr Fauci used "infected" with two different meanings. Infected-a meant only that antibodies were detected in tests irrespective of symptoms. Infected-b meant someone "had" COVID, i.e., symptoms, like someone "has" cancer or the flu. This has been a basic problem with how COVID has been discussed from the start, and it's led to the widespread fear that a positive test is a death sentence. So this leads to another question that nobody really answers: what's the likelihood that someone who tests positive will develop symptoms at all? As of July 2020, this site published an official CDC estimate : Asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, or those who do not experience any symptoms, unknowingly contribute to the spread of COVID-19, infectious disease experts say. Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Pre...