In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I was looking at the conservative aggregators this morning, and most reported optimistically about Trump's Florence, AZ rally last night. The surprise was this report from The Atlantic, Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign . Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is. “I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back." . . . Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump only lost Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to ...

This is a third in a series of posts on Fermi's Paradox, which started here . My thinking in recent years is driven by a remark from the then-vocation director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who posed this question to a discussion group of seminarians: If aliens arrive from outer space, should we offer them baptism? I don't think he had a single right or wrong answer in mind, but I find the overall direction of his thinking compelling. It's actually in full conformity with the views of pop cosmologist Carl Sagan, the author of the Voyager Disk illustrated above, as well as the late 20th century science fiction universe exemplified by the Star Trek-Star Wars franchises -- except that I think it subverts them via a reductio ad absurdum . Let's start with the assumption behind the Voyager Disk, which is clearly that it's intended to be found someday, even eons and light years distant, by an alien civilization that has the rational resources to decrypt it. I...

Biden, appearing to admit defeat on ending the filibuster & nationalizing elections, randomly starts shouting: States’ voter reform laws are “about who gets to count the votes! Count the vote! Count the vote!” pic.twitter.com/66LpGL1ckQ — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 13, 2022 For whatever reason, there's been little comment on President Biden's latest rant. At about 0:47 in the clip taken yesterday after his meeting with Senate leadership, he begins shouting "Count the vote! Count the vote!" in an incoherent break from earlier more measured remarks. This follows occasional observatioins that presidents haven't traditionally traveled to Capitol Hill to beg for votes before they're counted (or indeed, when a vote is counted and certain to go against them). But this is the second time he's done this, and I noted in November what a bad and unpresidential strategy it was. But this week, he doubled down on it. Not for nothing did Sen McConnell ca...

I think there are numerous signs now that the lizard people are scrambling for a Plan B: Hillary Clinton 2024 Gains Steam Biden-Cheney 2024? VP Harris Dodges on if There Will Be Same 2024 Democrat Ticket Nancy Pelosi's Eyebrows Are A Thing -- No, Really Nancy Pelosi makes millions off tech stocks It's becoming harder and harder to finesse the failure of the Biden-Pelosi agenda, and one sign of it is, as I pointed out yesterday, that the elevation of the speaker's eyebrows is an annual event that up to now has caused little comment. Today, it's a thing. One did not, up to now, disrespect the speaker. Indeed, the direct comparison to Michael Jackson raises the even less mentionable circumstance, that Speaker Pelosi's public persona is basically that of a drag queen. The media at this point, now that her signature issue is lost, has no reason to cover for her. It's also significan...

Last summer, I posted on what in early 2021 seemed to be a consensus "Götterdämmerung strategy" among the elites, whereby Speaker Pelosi, possibly expected to retire after the 2022 election, would use slim congressional majorities, plus control of the White House, to enact a massive Great Reset agenda and ignore the post-2022 consequences because, well, she'd be retired by then. I likened this to someone who, assuming the world would end on December 21, decided to run up a huge credit card bill that would never need to be repaid. I was always skeptical that this would work, but there have been only a few voices of sanity over the past year who raised the point that Pelosi had only a single-digit majority in the House, with the Senate evenly tied. Throughout the fall and winter, it became more clear that there weren't enough votes among Senate Democrats even to reach a tie on the Götterdämmerung agenda. Beyond that, House Republican leader McCarthy is announcing...

On Friday, President Biden gave a typically incoherent statement on COVID : President Joe Biden said on Friday he did not believe the coronavirus will be a permanent affliction for Americans. "No, I don't think COVID is here to stay," Biden told reporters after remarks on the U.S. economy. "The new normal is not going to be what it is now, it's going to be better." But all of a sudden, for reasons that aren't clear to me at all, the emphasis has shifted from shots to tests. Nearly 50 House and Senate Democrats are calling on the Biden administration to substantially increase the nation's supply of rapid COVID-19 tests. In a letter led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lawmakers acknowledged efforts already underway, like acquiring 500 million additional tests and setting up federal testing sites, but said the administration needs to do more to boost supplies. "...

According to Politico yesterday, Fresh off a high-profile speech in which he warned that a dagger had been placed at the throat of American democracy, President Joe Biden will travel to the state that White House officials view as “ground zero” for Republican-led election suppression efforts. Biden will speak in Georgia on Tuesday. In his remarks, he is expected to not only echo the themes of his address on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection but to expand on his endorsement of a filibuster carveout to pass voting rights legislation in the Senate. . . . “We are doubling down, kicking it into another gear, we are going right to the belly of the beast, or ground zero, for voter suppression, voter subversion and obstruction,” said Cedric Richmond, White House senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement. Politico makes the point that the real issue isn't Georgia, it's Sen Manchin, though Manchin himself isn't named: “It's really about the...