In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This is an intersectional story, because it links pilots who shouldn't be flying, magic mushrooms, and Oregon. According to KRON4, Joseph David Emerson, 44, of Pleasant Hill [CA], was off-duty and sitting in the cockpit Sunday evening when he suddenly tried to cut off the jet’s engines, according to on-duty pilots who flew Horizon Air Flight AS 2059. The pilots said they wrestled with Emerson for control of the aircraft, he pulled on emergency controls to cut the engines’ fuel, and the jet was “seconds away” from becoming a glider, prosecutors wrote in court documents. The quick-thinking captain, co-pilot, and flight crew were able to throw Emerson out of the cockpit, handcuff him, and make an emergency landing at a Portland airport. On Tuesday, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office filed 84 charges against Emerson, including 83 counts of felony second-degree attempted murder, and one count of endangering an aircraft. The flight had 11 passengers who were ch...

This post on Xwitter sums up the questions many Republicans have been posing in recent weeks: Maher Bitar, a Palestinian activist, Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian with deep ties in Iran are heading up our intelligence and defense. Robert Malley, who hired Tabatabai, had his security clearance removed. @MTG can oversight get answers? pic.twitter.com/L0Zk83cx5S — #ProblemSolved (@ProblemSolved57) October 21, 2023 In other words, are Bitar, Tabatabai, and certain other figures like Reema Dodin currently working in sensitive jobs in the US government, actually agents of one sort or another for Iran or the Palestinians? If they are, while I acknowledge I'm a total outsider to that business, there are things that don't fit. Let's just compare Bitar and Tabatabai to one of the most successful spies in recent history, Robert Hanssen, whose photo is at the top of this post. According to Wikipedia, Robert Philip Hanssen (April 18, 1944 – June 5, 2023) was an American Fed...

One thing I've come to notice about the recent questionable diplomatic and intelligence appointments in the administration like Robert Malley and Ariane Tabatabai is how quickly their careers have taken off, although Malley's is currently on hold. As I noted with some puzzlement in this post , by the time she was about 30 as a PhD student, Tabatabai was writing in prestigious foreign policy journals and then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation. Her main qualification appears to have been that she is the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran who is close to the mullahs in the government there. Over the weekend i saw mention of a similar figure, Maher Bitar, who we're told is of Palestinian heritage, but about whom we otherwise know little besides a precocious career rise much like Tabatabai's. His profile as a member of Georgetown Law School's class of 201...

Harvard gets 60,000 applicants every year, and if Harvard came to its senses and expelled your genocide-loving asses, 59,300 would happily run over their own grandmothers to fill your spot https://t.co/H1D9Yb3eYV — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 20, 2023 The post on Xwitter above raises an interestimg question: right now, we're at the start of the 2024 college application season. Early decision deadlines begin on November 1, while regular decisions start early next year. The current brouhaha over pro-Palestine demonstrations at elite schools ought to affect applications over the coming 2024 admissions season, right? For instance, here's Bill Maher : As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college, and if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because, as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid. There are few, if any, positives to come out of wha...

Yesterday the Comer committee released a copy of a $200,000 personal check from Joe's younger brother Jim to Joe himself, characteied as a "loan repayment". Per the committee, In 2018, James Biden received $600,000 in loans from, Americore—a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator. According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans “based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.” On March 1, 2018, Americore wired a $200,000 loan into James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account – not their business bank account. And then on the very same day, James Biden wrote a $200,000 check from this same personal bank account to Joe Biden. There's less to this than meets the eye. There's no specific quid pro quo involved, at least from what we can see now, and Joe was out of office at the time....

I began following Glenn Reynolds as Instapundit not long after 9/11. His pitch at the time, as outlined in An Army of Davids (2006) was libertarian, and I was never quite comfortable with the title -- anyone who studies the Old Testament in any depth won't be comfortable with the prospect of a Sorcerer's Apprentice calling up legions of Davids. One was plenty -- ask Uriah the Hittite. But this is just one illustration of the shallowness of Reynolds's thought processes. His intellectual mentors include Ayn Rand, Robert A Heinlein, and Philip K Dick. His predictions have fallen short. In the link, Reynolds titles a chapter 'Small Is the New Big'. He discusses the rise of "armchair workers" (through companies such as eBay), doing work at home—as well as specialty-based cottage industries such as Coffin's Shoes in Knoxville, TN. He argues that future trends will create a mosaic of co-existing big box retailers, local firms, and busines...

There's been very little this morning about Joe's presser aboard Air Force One following his departure from Israel. The most pointed was at Gateway Pundit , which posted stills of John Kirby's expressions as Joe spoke. A full video -- about 13 minutes -- of the presentation is available on C-Span . As in the stills, the most important feature is the body language and expressions of the handlers. From the start to about 2:30, Karine Jean-Pierre is visible in the lower right quadrant looking glum. Beginning about 1:45, John Kirby appears between Joe and Ms Jean-Pierre looking volcanic. At 2:27, Joe says to the press, "You guys are such a pain in the neck," and Kirby and Jean-Pierre adopt the expressions of middle school administrators contemplating a riot in the stairwells. At 2:35, Kirby and Jean-Pierre withdraw beyond camera view to consult. This seems to have been a message to Joe to go to questions from the press. When these begin, Kirby adopts a pain...