In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This moirning's news was full of gleeful headlines that the horsefaced and sublimely self-satisfied Alissa Heinerscheid, late brand marketing VP for Bud Light, is on leave of absence : Anheuser-Busch has shared a statement with Beer Business Daily, informing the publication that Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid is off the brand in the wake of the Mulvaney Bud Light can controversy. “We understand she has decided to take a leave of absence,” Beer Business Daily announced. “Todd Allen is now VP of Bud Light, reporting directly to CMO Benoit Garbe. It appears Todd was most recently VP of global marketing for Budweiser.” However, I posted a week ago that Alissa was already out, and that she'd deleted her LinkedIn profile was a good indication. I suspect that she hadn't been in to the office since the Dylan Mulvaney story broke. But let's read some other tea leaves here. The story says, “Todd Allen is now VP of Bud Light. . . . It appears Todd was most rece...

One of my stylistic models for some years has been the mid-20th century noir writer Jim Thompson, author of titles like The Alcoholics (1953), The Criminal (1953), A Swell-Looking Babe (1954), and The Grifters (1963). He never titled any of his novels The Frammis , but it was a term his characters frequently used, which in context referred to the overriding scheme of avarice and betrayal that drove the narrative. The media, even on the right, have been on an extended spring break, but as they slowly return to working at the office, the intermittent leaks are beginning to reveal the shape of the Biden frammis. First, he's clearly going to run. This was solidified during that strange trip to Ireland with his sister, Valerie, and his living son, Hunter. We all know who Hunter is, but it's worth catching up on Valerie. According to Wikipedia , Valerie Biden Owens (November 5, 1945) is an American political strategist, campaign manager and former educator. She is t...

One: Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits At least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation that was covered up at the highest level, according to an explosive new court filing. A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI. The story reprises, in more detail and with new information, a concern that had been raised in the wake of 9/11, that protocols between FBI and CIA operations prevented agents on the ground from reporting what they were learning about the upcoming attacks to their respective chains of command. In late 1999, with “the system blinking red” about an imminent large-scale Al Qaeda terror attack inside the US, the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring an “oper...

I really have no comment to make on his recernt dire predictions about artificial intelligence -- either he doesn't understand it very well, or I don't, but this is a guy who has something like ten kids, all parented via surrogacy from what we can tell, along with an additional bunch of frozen embryos he made with Amber Heard. Allegedly. I'm going to trust my judgment over his in practically any matter, including what to do with Twitter. On the other hand, he's unexpectedly said something smart : Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “if anyone would know about aliens on Earth it would probably be me.” “To the best of my knowledge, we see no evidence of conscious life anywhere in the universe,” Musk said. “So it might be there. You know, in physics they call it sort of the Fermi paradox after when Enrico Fermi, he’s an amazing physicist, asked the fundamental question, where are the aliens?” “I’ve seen no evidence of aliens,” Musk said, adding that i...

Maybe it's my age, but in recent days I keep returning to the 1970s, rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade", thinking about the implications of the 1972 election, suddenly realizing that the Teixeira leaks are nothing but a reprise of the Pentagon Papers, and musing that this all carries lessons for the Bud Light fiasco. What brought me to focus on this was remarks by Marianne Williamson, a member of my 1970s demographic, that President Joe Biden “hasn’t done enough” for working-class Americans . She spoke at a restaurant in Dover, NH: “Now, I am a Democrat. I am a Roosevelt Democrat. I believe that the Democratic Party should stand for unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States,” she went on to tell the restaurant. “In order for us to win in 2024 and in order for us to repair this country, we have to be willing … to cut the cord with the last 50 years of history, we have to be willing to begin a new era,” Williamson said. It's hard ...

The two intelligence experts I quoted yesterday (if that's what they are) are in agreement that the documents in the Teixeira leaks are valid, and they suggest an imminent reassessment of Western policy. But the overall context of the war had begun to convince me that there was going to have to be a reassessment whether secret documents were released or not. An expected winter counteroffensive didn't take place, while the consensus now is that the spring counteroffensive has been delayed . Here is a CNN assessment from last Friday of what the Teixeira documents say about the Ukraine war. It's worth noting that the US right has been opposed to the war from the start, while CNN, aligned with the left, has up to now supported it. Somne of the documents divulge key weaknesses in Ukrainian weaponry, air defense, and battalion sizes and readiness at a critical point in the war, as Ukrainian forces gear up to launch a counteroffensive against the Russians – and just a...

Starting with the original line that Jack Teixeira's online group was a bunch of right-wing racists. (Teixeira is a Hispanic surname, from any of the places in Portugal and Spain named Teixeira ). The US Census Bureau defines "Hispanic" as either someone with a surname that is carried on the Bureau's list of Hispanic surnames, or someone who lived in a household where he or she spoke Spanish as a child. Perhaps the New York Times, among others, could revive the term "white Hispanic". But beyond that, subsequent accounts have quoted a member of his online group that described him as "Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what’s going on,” which would actually fit Christian antiwar protesters of past generations like the Berrigan brothers, Roman Catholic priests who led the antiwar and antidraft movements during the Vietnam War. Neither was a right-wing racist. But that leaves aside the bigger question of just what the...