In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Just for fun, I did a google search this morning on "Biden sniffing hair" to see if anyone had anything intelligent to say about last weekend's episodes, and the messages above came up -- "It looks like the results below are changing quickly". This is actually the first I've ever seen this message on a search, which suggests more people than usual are looking it up -- but nobody has anything new to say about it. However, this tweet from last July suggests it's been going on steadily in the background and has never really stopped, despite the big guy's 2019 promise to abstain: Dad ran into Joe on a biking trail in Delaware and got a live sniffing video lmfao pic.twitter.com/qz9KuEzN9E — martman (@big__marty) July 10, 2022 This raises a question of etiquette if nothing else. A year ago, Brandon caused a minor stir when he put his hand on Prince William's shoulder during a visit to the UK. One does not touch the royals. Indeed, I assume th...

On April 3, 2019, Joe Biden said he’s ready to respect people’s “personal space” after new attention came to allegations he had acted inappropriately with women. “I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, ‘You can do this.’ Whether they are women, men, young, old, it’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the way I show I care about them, that I listen,” he said. “Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying, I understand it. And I’ll be much more mindful. That’s my responsibility and I’ll meet it.” Biden offered no direct apology for his past actions but said he would be mindful of changing norms around physical contact. But as of this weekend, he's back to being creepy with little girls. On Friday, in Irvine, CA, he'd returned to his old ways: President Joe Biden grabs a young girl by the shoulder and tells her “no...

In the week following the explosion or explosions on the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea with European Russia, there have been lots of questions and few solid answers. Initial analysis of the damage, even from informed engineers, was sanguine. For instance, as of this past Monday , Observers have been left wondering: what was the effect of the blast and fire on the surviving bridge elements, what repairs could be required, and when is it safe to re-open a bridge after such an event? As experts in bridge safety and blast engineering, we have (some) answers. . . . In structural engineering, safety is not an either-or proposition. It is measured on a continuum known as the probability of failure, or more positively, the reliability index of a structure. . . . for key bridges such as the Crimean Bridge, it may be reasonable to accept a reduced level of safety when the costs associated with a disruption are very high. Cranes have been shown lifting the fuel tanker wagon wreckage o...

The fallout from the PayPal "glitch", whereby they announced they would debit customer accounts up to $2500 directly for publishing "misinformation", continues. Do not take their $15 bribe. Delete your PayPal account. https://t.co/lFd7QBxG7M — Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 13, 2022 Despite this, however, it sounds as though PayPal has been experiencing an effective bank run : Following the trend to boycott PayPal, some users were having a problem closing their accounts. One user commented, “Endless hours chatting with the support here. Some people are able to close it in seconds. Others it takes weeks. Criminal.” Another said, “Looks like they’ve disabled Account Closure over at Paypal to prevent customers exiting their platform. No doubt there’ll be the usual corporate-speak on “temporary technical issue” inbound.” Well, consumers aren't stupid. When I began to research this issue, I discovered information that was already in the public doma...

As I've been saying, since late February, Ukraine President Zelensky has been setting a de facto agenda for the Western response to the invasion, and if he doesn't get what he wants right away, he gets it later. Sec Austin's remarks (translated back to English from a Ukrainian report at the link) at the start of yesterday's Ramstein conference reflect this state of affairs: In Brussels on October 12, the next Ramstein meeting brought together defense ministers from about 50 countries to discuss assistance to Ukraine. Opening the meeting, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin stated that the dynamics of the war unleashed by the Kremlin had changed. He stressed the serious progress of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in this conflict, Dialog.UA reports . . . . He stressed that the Ukrainian troops changed the dynamics of the war by seizing the initiative from the occupier. It seems to me that Sec Austin is talking about two dynamics. Ukraine seized the initiative a few mont...

I said yesterday that Volodymyr Zelensky is the de facto leader of the free world. Elsewhere I've maintained the point that he makes proposals that at first seem out of bounds -- longer range missiles like HIMARS, for instance -- but are eventually approved, often in unofficial ways, by Western countries. So far in every case, Ukraine has made effective use of them, which gives him more credibility with each subsequent proposal. I complained yesterday, as I've complained before, that there's been no Roosevelt equivalent who can lead a Western consensus on what a world would look like after the Axis forces, or in this case, the Russian bloc, is defeated, even though the Russo-Ukraine war almost immediately turned into a proxy conflict between Russia and the West, with the effective defeat of Russia as a geopoliical force the inevitable outcome. I had an instinctive sense that Zelensky might provide a substitute in his address to the emergency meeting of the G7 yesterda...

Let's get real. The de facto leader of the free world is Volodymyr Zelensky. For now, everyone else is in reactive mode, and the whole subtext for the rest is what they can send Zelensky in the way of second-tier NATO weapons that won't provoke Putin to use nukes. The result is a slo-mo collapse of the former Russian empire, done on the cheap. It's generally understood, based on the unofficial threat from Gen Petraeus more than a week ago, that if NATO were to step in with more advanced weapons, the war would end in a matter of days. So the state of the game is Putin loses more or less slowly, or he loses right away, nukes or not. Conversely, Zelensky wins slowly as Western leaders gradually recognize that Putin has no credible response to their weapons, or Zelensky wins quickly when Putin makes some last, critical miscalculation, and either NATO ships long range missles, F-16s, Panthers, or whatever else, or NATO steps in directly. For now, the clearest potential Puti...