In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Scary clip BIDEN: "It's my intention to run again." MSNBC: "Dr. Biden is for it?" BIDEN: crickets MSNBC: "Mr. President?" BIDEN: "Dr. Biden thinks that uh, my wife thinks that uh, that I uh, that, that we're, that we're doing something very important." pic.twitter.com/lPVyEi2kv3 — Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 21, 2022 When I think back on my corporate career, I remember case after case where the Senior VP, or whatever the big boss's title was, had been told he was no longer needed. At that level, they were never escorted out the door, but it was plain they had only weeks remaining. Still, they were allowed to keep up appearances until the end. But you could read the signs. They didn't show up at the planning meeting for next fiscal year, for instance. Rhetorically, President Brandon's remarks in the interview linked above give the game away: "It's my intention to run again." Not "Don't be s...

As I suggested yesterday, the world globalist consensus doesn't know quite what to do with President Zelensky. Leading up to February 24, the conventional wisdom across the board was that Russia would reach Kyiv within days, and the humane option was to offer Zelensky and his circle rides out on C-130s. When he refused to do this, it took policymakers by surprise and created an instant bien pensant consensus in favor of Ukraine, without a whole lot of reflection on what this might imply. Witness just this tweet from last night: At fundraiser tonight, @POTUS blasted GOP for potentially scaling down aid to Ukraine. “It's a lot bigger than Ukraine. It's Eastern Europe. It's NATO. It's real serious, serious consequential outcomes. They have no sense of American foreign policy." — Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) October 20, 2022 But wait, up to late February, American foreign policy was to offer Zelensky a ride out , wasn't it? The Associated Press reported ...

I've seen some intriguing data points over the past day that are giving me some ideas about what the people who really run the show are thinking. First, the US State Department, Antony Blinken ( net worth $65 million , although the Blinken family controls far more), Secretary, has had to spank President Brandon yet again for un-vetted remarks: Biden made the offending comments at a Democrat Party event at a private home in California last week. Offering disorganized remarks commenting on nuclear weapons generally, Biden mentioned Pakistan amid boasting yet again that he has a close personal relationship with dictator Xi Jinping of China. . . . “This is a guy [Xi] who understands what he wants but has an enormous, enormous array of problems. How do we handle that?” the president asked. “How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.” . . . Fo...

I had one of those nights last night when I woke up with the feeling I hadn't fully figured something out. It clearly stemmed from Francis Fukuyama's Atlantic essay that I linked yesterday . I would summarize it via the following excerpts. First, [Russia and China] were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador. But we mustn't lose heart. Indeed, The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. . . . When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with ["the end of history"] in the title, I noted that the Marxist v...

In a piece at The Atlantic, More Proof That This Really Is the End of History , Francis Fukuyama doubles down: The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. But why should there be only two alternatives, Hegel-Fukuyama and Marxism? When I first posted about Mr Fukuyama here , I suggested that Osama bin Laden needed to hear that message but clearly didn't. And although Marxism has reverted to the parlor and the faculty lounge where it had been before 1917, this hasn't cured the problem of bi...

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...