In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As you might expect, the story of where the cocaine was found in or near the White House has been morphing with each new report. Via CBS News, this seems to be the latest reliable veresion : The substance was found in a common area of the West Wing, which houses the Oval Office and offices of some of the president's top aides and support staff. A senior law enforcement official told CBS News the substance was found in a storage facility in a cubby routinely used by White House staff and guests to store cell phones. The Secret Service will lead a full review of how the substance got into the West Wing, the law enforcement officials told CBS News, including examining consulting cameras and entrance logs to determine who had access to the space. I looked up "cubby" and find that Merriam-Webster defines it as "a small, snug place (as for hiding or storage) : cubbyhole." A web search gave the image above. The tweet below from James Rosen gives a little bit mo...

The bare bones are as follows : An 'unknown item' was found near the White House in Washington D.C. Roads surrounding the area were briefly closed as a precautionary measure. . . . The DC Fire Department's Hazmat team responded and the White House grounds were evacuated as a precaution, the Secret Service spokesman Anthony Gugliemi added. DC Fire and EMS was contacted to evaluate, USSS said. . . . DC Fire Hazmat officials report that they have found a substance that tests positive for Cocaine Hydrochloride, a highly addictive and illegal drug. The event has caused people to wonder how a possibly harmful material got onto the grounds of the White House and whether it was done on purpose to damage or intimidate the president or his team. . . . The Secret Service announced that it was looking into the event and collaborating with other law enforcement organizations to ascertain the object's origin and nature. . . . Hazmat teams were reportedly seen ...

A small data point caught my eye last week: A viral video of a pastor at Edina Community Lutheran Church in Minneapolis reciting the Sparkle Creed has left netizens enraged. In part, this was because as a dedicated Fringe fan, the only other place named Edina I'm aware of appeared in Season 2, Episode 11 of that marvelous show, which starred, among others, the late Lance Reddick. The original title of the episode was to have been "Edina City Limits", and it took place in the fictitious town of Edina, NY, which was home to a phenomenon called "the Edina hum". According to the Wikipedia link, the hum was the result of an experiment done by the army in the late 1970s to test how electromagnetic pulses can camouflage soldiers and was conducted on the townspeople; the army was unaware of the long-term effects of the study until it was too late, and the people were stuck in a deformed state. The "hum" hides their deformities from the human e...

This piece at the Washington Free Beacon outlines Joe's and Hunter's efforts to get Hunter's underperforming daughter Maisy (shown with Joe in the photo above) into the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania: Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon , show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country. "I applied early decision to Penn today!!" Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31. Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy's application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann. On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was "going to try to see ...

There's been a lot of commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina cases. Just last Tuesday, I posted on the question of legacies , admissions policies that privilege offspring of alumni, in the makeup of Ivy League student bodies and their consequent impact on the US upper class. This is something of a mirror-image view of the affirmative action problem the court addressed, and it was discussed to some extent in the reporting. According to the New York Post , At Harvard, applicants are initially scrutinized by a “first reader,” who gives the prospective student a numerical score in six categories: academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support, personal, and “overall”, taking race into account for the final number. But the final decision doesn't really reflect all those criteria: During a final winnowing process, four factors a...

People have been commenting on the photos of Hunter boarding Marine One on the way to Camp David with his dad or at the state dinner with Prime Minister Moti, which are taken as a tacit signal that Hunter has been fully rehabilitated following his guilty pleas to various misdemeanors and settlemenmt of his child support case with Lunden Roberts. The question I have, though, is if this is meant to show that things are back to normal with the First Crackhead, where are the First Crackhead's wife and three-year-old son? They were notably absent from the past week's events, as far as I can tell. The most recent sighting I've beem able to find is in the UK Daily Mail from May 11 , where they were in LA together: The president's son had his little boy in his arms and his wife Melissa Cohen trailing close behind as he left the children's playground and got into a black Suburban under the supervision of security personnel. But every indication has been that Hun...

There's been a small stir this week over a new Gallup poll that says church attendance in the United States is lower than it was before the COVID lockdowns . On one hand, this shouldn't be a surprise, as stories have already covered this without the need for Gallup to ask about it again. A Pew Research poll just this past March reported: There are some indications that in-person engagement in religious services has declined slightly since 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33% to 30%) over that span, and one-in-five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic. The Gallup results aren't much different, so I'm not sure why anyone bothered. Per the first link, In the Gallup survey, 31 percent of respondents said they have attended church, synagogue, mosque or temp...