In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In yesterday's news: On March 13, 2017, less than seven weeks after concluding his second term as vice president, Joe Biden announced the founding of the Biden Institute at his home state’s University of Delaware (UD). According to the announcement, part of Biden’s “vision for the institute is an annual conference at UD, similar to the World Economic Forum or the Aspen Institute.” . . . Prior to hosting the Biden Institute, UD had never disclosed any funding from China. One year later (and just two months after the Penn Biden center opened its D.C. office), anonymous donations from China to UD skyrocketed. The first payment came in April 2018 in the amount of $3,204,070 from an anonymous donor in China. In December 2018, another anonymous donation from China arrived for $1,869,515. A third anonymous China-linked payment, for $624,904, arrived in December 2019. In 2020, the year that Biden was campaigning for president, anonymous Chinese state-linked entities sent three more pa...

I subscribe to COVID skeptic Alex Berenson's Substack, and it's worth noting that pretty much his entire take on COVID from Day One has been vindicated. The whole regime, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, no church, school closures, work-from-home, universal vaccination and universal boosters, has proven not just ineffective but in many cases counterproductive. Overall public health in terms of life expectancy and the effects of delayed non-COVID care has declined. Is it over, tbough? I'm not sure. One thing I've noticed is that the little stickers and calibrations on sidewalks and floors that reminded people to stay six feet apart have largely disappeared. This suggests to me that there was a program to power wash them away at some point, probably in the middle of the night, but I went looking for web images of the process on the web -- just a guy in municipal coveralls, say, with a spray wand whooshing away the footprint stickers from a sidewalk -- and came...

Lost in the weekend's news about UFOs and space aliens was this item, covered best as usual in the UK Daily Mail : The Secret Service has been accused of a 'cover-up' over its alleged involvement in a police investigation when Hunter Biden's lover dumped his gun in a trash can near a school in 2018. Judicial Watch, a justice watchdog nonprofit, announced on Friday that it received 487 pages of Secret Service (USSS) records over the incident, and says the documents cast further doubt over the agency's claims that it was not involved. Hunter's lover and brother's widow, Hallie Biden, left his .38 handgun at the top of a trash can at Jansens supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware in October 2018, sparking a police probe. The reemergence of the story is due to new confirmation of Secret Service involvement in the cleanup, even though Joe was out of office at the time, and Hunter wasn't a protectee as a family member. Via a Freedom of Information Act req...

Regarding the curtrent spate of UFOs, Time reports, Other than the first balloon, which China has acknowledged was theirs, the Pentagon doesn’t yet know what the objects are or where they came from. Asked directly, a senior military official did not rule out the possibility that their provenance could be extraterrestrial. I have several reactions, the main one being that if these are alien visitors, they would have needed warp drive-style technology to get here, given their likely home planet would be hundreds or thousands of light years away. So an obsolescent F-16 with a heat-seeking missile can shoot one down as it piddles along at 20,000 feet? This doesn't even fit the War of the Worlds model of alien invasion. According to Wikipedia, The main narrative begins when an object thought to be a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the narrator's home. The narrator discovers that it is an artificial cylinder. Some Martians emerge briefly, but have diffi...

Out of all the weekend's news, the UFOs, the FBI wanting to infiltrate the sedevacantists, the new revelations on the classified document coverup, the one thing I haven't been able to drop is why Abbe Lowell has been pounding the table for his client, Hunter Biden. I talked about this Friday. I'm not a lawyer, but then, neither was Raymond Burr, who just played one on TV. But Jonathan Turley is one, both a law professor and a practicing criminal defense attorney, and he offers an insight that I'd missed : [Lowell and the Biden team] seem to be adopting the strategy of Steve Bannon that resulted in his conviction for contempt of Congress. Lowell categorically refused to turn over material to Congress this week, leaving his client open to a subpoena and possible prosecution. The move may have thrilled hardcore Democrats, but it is the Republicans who should be most ecstatic with Hunter's initial position. . . . In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chair Ja...

Almost completely ignored in Thursday's news was this item, which shows how poorly reporters are actually following the classified documents story: House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has issued a detailed request to a former Joe Biden "gatekeeper" for documents and communications from her time working at the Penn-Biden center, specifically anything related to her involvement in the handling and removal of "highly classified" materials. The story doesn't even mention the gatekeeper's name until halfway down: "The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden's possession of highly classified documents from his time as Vice President," Comer wrote to Kathy Chung in a Feb. 4 letter. "The documents retrieved from President Biden's personal office and home included documents designated as 'sensitive compartmented information' ... which is used for highly sensitive inform...

I'm still puzzled about Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden's most visible and likely most expensive attorney. Via this account at The Hill, In a sharply worded opening volley against the House GOP’s probe into Hunter Biden and the business dealings of President Biden’s family, an attorney for the president’s son denied a request for documents and information from the Oversight and Accountability Committee, saying it has “no legislative purpose.” “Peddling your own inaccurate and baseless conclusions under the guise of a real investigation, turns the Committee into ‘Wonderland’ and you into the Queen of Hearts shouting, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwords,’” Abbe David Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, wrote a letter sent Thursday. I've never been to law school, and I'm not an attorney. But just a lifetime spent following the news suggests to me that I could have written this statement, and in fact, since I was an English major, I probably could have written a better on...