In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Here's just another data point on the condition of the big guy's mind : President Joe Biden surprised viewers Friday when pausing his speech to acknowledge a woman in the crowd he said he knew when she was 12. “You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said during a speech at the National Education Association headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We go back a long way. She was 12 — I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.” Biden did not acknowledge how he knew the woman or what she did that helped him, but the remark caught viewers off guard. Videos of the remarks show a remarkably animated Biden as he recalls whatever the episode might have been: As opposed to his normal affectless. squint-eyed expression, he's flirty and even devilish as he alludes to some mutual memory that had to have been at least a bit naughty. A few commentators have noted that the audience, teachers' union members, giggled and tittered with the big guy. It...

After a two-month absence from YouTube, Austrian Col Reisner is back after only two weeks with another odd take on the Russo-Ukraine War. Let me preface this by saying yet again that I was thrown out of the ROTC after a year, and that's the full extent of my experience in the US or any other country's army. But here's my take on that war. Russia, thought to be the second-ranked military power on the planet, managed to bungle its invasion of Ukraine from the start. Within days, US generals were commenting that the Russian army was simply failing to meet its initial objectives, and this was with Ukraine's army having no Western resupply and fighting almost entirely with its existing stock of hand-held anti-tank weapons and cheap drones. Within months, still with hesitant Western support, Ukraine was able to force the Russians to retreat from their main line of attack, the effort to seize Kyiv. In the next phase of the war, Ukraine fought Russia to a stalemate with se...

So Scott Adams has inserted himself into the news : “Dilbert” author Scott Adams, who has been drawing the comic since 1989, said the strip that pokes fun at office culture was wiped from nearly 77 newspapers. Lee Enterprises, which owns nearly 100 newspaper companies in the US, terminated the contract with “Dilbert” for unknown reasons, reports Fox News. “It was part of a larger overhaul, I believe, of comics, but why they decided what was in and what was out, that’s not known to anybody except them, I guess,” said Adams, who noted it coincidentally happened after he incorporated “wokeness” into the stories. I've followed him long enough to recognize there's nothing new about this. In 2016, he supported Trump, and at the time, he complained that his speaking engagements fell to almost nothing -- and I think he recognized that Trump didn't sit well with the Silicon Valley types and tech workers who felt Adams was on their side. I watched his YouTube channel at t...

I'm convinced there's a latter-day George F Kennan now at the State Department who, like the one who wrote the Long Telegram, has the ear of some contemproary Averell Harriman, who in turn can tell important people what to do. Consider that the one area in which President Brandon has effectively recused himself in recent months has been Ukraine. Either Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, or Gen Milley articulates US Ukraine policy and says (or carefully omits to say) what weapons we are sending there. Early in the game, it seems the big guy contradicted Secretary Blinken on whether Ukraine would get third-party surplus Migs, but somehow the Migs happened anyhow, while the big guy effectively stopped talking about Ukraine. At all. Biden's tendency to ramble and interfere has been fairly well documented, for instance : The veteran Senator, as Obama saw it, had a tendency to “ramble, clearly loving every minute of it". The would-be President is said to have c...

The N-word in this case is "narcissism". Last week I ran across this more or less typical piece of pop psychology : Based on an analysis of the 19 presidents who served between 1897 and 2009 (from William McKinley to George W. Bush), the degree to which a commander in chief exhibited grandiose narcissistic personality traits is correlated with the duration of any wars they presided over. . . . [Ohio State political scientist John P Harden] used data pulled from the Correlates of War database, which tracks conflicts involving at least 1,000 deaths in battle within a one-year period – so 11 operations for the US during the study period. This was cross-referenced with previous research that analyzed the characters of US presidents, in part through their biographers. High levels of assertiveness and excitement-seeking, and low levels of modesty, compliance and straightforwardness were used to measure narcissistic tendencies. US chiefs who scored lower on narcissism, includ...

As the saying goes, you don't have dementia if you forget your keys. You have dementia if you forget what your keys are for. President Brandon seems to have stepped all over not just his allies but his diplomatic advisers in Sunday's 60 Minutes interview , but I see no signs of dementia. The reaction at the Daily Kos was predictable to his announcement that the pandemic is over: 'You’re counting votes.' We are 'counting bodies': Experts outraged at Biden deeming pandemic over . But nobody seems to dispute that he was aware of his surroundings, knew this was a television interview, and was more or less aware of the questions and giving answers that reflected the overall context. The problem was that he basically hadn't done the prep. The public health establishment is at the very best deeply divided over what to do next with the pandemic; over the summer, it became clear that the public is fed up with vax and masks, and it quietly backed off on threats ...

Yesterday, I noted that prior to the first weeks of the Russo-Ukraine War, there was an effective consensus that Russia was the second-strongest military power and a near peer to the US and NATO. Trump has had a fair amount of criticism for remarks earlier this year that have been interpreted as "praising Putin", but I think if we take them in context of prevailing world opinion, they don't strike me as unusual. This piece at CNN lists some of Trump's remarks on Putin from last spring: At a campaign rally in Georgia [March 26], the former President, again, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart. And I actually thought he was going to be negotiating. I said, ‘That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 soldiers on the border.’” Trump added that Putin made a “big mistake,” but that “it looked...