In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In a rambling article that takes maybe 1000 words to get anywhere near the point, Jeffrey Tucker at the Brownstone Institute finally provides a shocking insight into Dr Fauci's thought processes : In August of 2020, Fauci co-authored a major article for Cell that received very little attention. The article offers up the general theory that the underlying cause of all infectious disease is human contact, which is another way of saying society itself. “In a human-dominated world, in which our human activities represent aggressive, damaging, and unbalanced interactions with nature, we will increasingly provoke new disease emergencies.” Tucker then quotes Fauci: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement, catalyzes disease spread. . . . Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as ot...

From Newsweek on January 7, 2021 (he was arrested January 9 in Phoenix): One of the most visible and prominent QAnon supporters among the violent crowd of extremists who stormed the Capitol building has been forced to deny he is antifa after a number of radical conspiracy theorists turned on him following the unprecedented attack. Jake Angeli, also known as the Q Shaman or QAnon Shaman, was widely photographed inside the building during the riots wearing his fur hat and horns and face painted in red, white and blue. . . . The Q Shaman is one of the most recognizable figures in the QAnon movement and has frequently appeared at right-wing rallies showing support for Donald Trump and disputing the election results. From PolitiFact on January 7, 2021 : Hours after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, several of his allies in Congress and the media baselessly claimed anti-fascist provacateurs were to blame for the violence. Some sugg...

The more I dig into the QAnon Shaman case and the surrounding issues, the more questions I have. The iconic image of the January 6 whatever-it-was is the one above, with Mr Chansley, shirtless, screaming at the ceiling next to some guy who looks like Rasputin as a Capitol Police officer remonstrates in a gesture that brings the viewer right into the scene. But let's ask a few questions. We now know that for several minutes, two Capitol Police officers escorted Mr Chansley to the Senate chamber -- and in most of those vignettes, Mr Chansley is alone with the officers as they progress through the empty halls. In fact, more detailed accounts of their progress indicate that the officers escorted him through a maze of corridors and up two flights of stairs to get to the Senate chamber. And all of this is captured on adequate, though not well-lit or high-quality, video. Let's briefly reprise the photo from yesterday's post. The more famous photo, unlike the security foo...

In this morning's news, Georgia GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, said on Wednesday that his panel is launching an investigation into the January 6 Committee to find out if important information about the day’s events was hidden by the panel. Let me put in a plug for one of my favorite TV shows of all time, On Patrol: Live on the REELZ channel, a clone-reboot of Live PD . which was paused but never revived by A&E in the wake of the BLM riots. If you want to check it out, it's on at 9PM Eastern tonight. As a shameless OP: Live/Live PD junkie, given the photo above, which is just one vignette from the Tucker Carlson footage of QAnon Shaman's progress through the Capitol on January 6, I've become familiar enough with police procedure to have a whole bunch of questions about this scene. And we'll drop any issues of context, for instance, what hundreds of screaming rioters may have been doi...

According to Wikipedia, The Reichstag fire (German: Reichstagsbrand ) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch "council communist", was the apparent culprit; however, Hitler attributed the fire to Communist agitators. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany. . . . Shortly after 9 p.m. on 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was reported as on fire, and firefighters were dispatched. Despite their efforts, most of the building was gutted. By 11:30 p.m., the fire was put out. ...

Much of the up to now suppressed January 6 Capitol footage that Tucker Carlson ran Monday night features Jacob Chansley, aka QAnon Shaman. There's been remarkably little commentary on Chansley's legal situation, although he's currently in federal prison serving a 41-month sentence on one count of obstructing an official proceeding, for which he pleaded guilty on September 3, 2021. The severity of the sentence was explained by the judge : Judge Royce Lamberth has had Chansley held in jail since his arrest, despite his multiple attempts to gain sympathy and his release. Other judges are likely to look to Lamberth’s sentence as a possible benchmark, since Chansley is one of the first felony defendants among more than 660 Capitol riot cases to receive a punishment. . . . “He made himself the image of the riot, didn’t he?” Lamberth said to Chansley’s defense attorney. “For good or bad, he made himself the very image of this whole event.” The release of the January 6 fo...

The photo above is of the avuncular Dr Francis Collins, former director of the US National Institutes of Health, who also happens to be a prominent Evangelical who has periodically argued that "rigorous science" poses no conflict with religious belief. But I suppose that depends on what the meanings of "rigorous science" and "religious belief" are -- and they certainly haven't stood in the way of Dr Collins getting the prestigious Templeton Award, notwithstanding his direct subordinate Dr Fauci has constantly insisted that the anti-religious COVID lockdown policies involving church closures are based on "science". In the context of the recent revelation that Dr Fauci in February 2020 commissioned an academic study that he then cited to refute the lab-leak theory of COVID's origin , it's worth revisiting a story that I first covered here last August , wherein Collins effectively ordered his subordinate Fauci and a colleague to s...