In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Fox News: Thomas Crooks’ parents were looking for him on Saturday in the hours leading up to the rally...Called law enforcement to indicate that he was missing...call happened on Saturday before Crooks later opened fire... pic.twitter.com/EblJ9am07L — Rantingly.com (@rantinglydotcom) July 17, 2024 Almost anything we might surmise, at least so far, about the Trump assassination attempt last Saturday has to be heavily hedged. The organs of state security are saying very little, and what they say is contradictory and often retracted days after it's said. But subject to that caveat, one data point stands out for me via the tweet above, the report that Crooks's parents were looking for him and had gone so far as to report him missing before the Butler rally Saturday afternoon. A few people responded in the thread below the post that this seems pretty unusual -- Thomas Matthew Crooks was 20 years old, and although he was a little strange, he wasn't the sort of at-risk person...

Tucker says this at about 8:00 in the video above, but he simply isn't the only one. To think this might even be an inside job is, frankly, against ordinary charity, against ordinary decorum in publc discourse, and against ordinary restraint -- but people are starting to come out and say it. The FBI investigation, which Joe says will be "thorough and swift", so far has been neither. But every day the loose ends go untied leads to more speculation, and the deep state is simply digging a hole for itself when it allows people like Secret Service Director Cheatle to set the tone : As the head of the agency, Cheatle said it's her responsibility to investigate what went wrong and make sure nothing like it can happen again. "The buck stops with me," she said. "I am the director of the Secret Service, and I need to make sure that we are performing a review and that we are giving resources to our personnel as necessary." Cheatle responded to repo...

I said on Sunday that I've been thinking about the Jason Bourne series of neo-noir movie thrillers since I started this blog. Some recent comments from Trump about his assassination strike me as pertinent: “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump told reporters from the New York Post and Washington Examiner aboard his plane to Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention will kick off Monday. Then regarding the Iwo Jima-style photo of him pumping his fist beneath the flag, he said, “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump said in the new interview. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.” I'm not sure if I like the word "iconic" -- it's overused, and it seems to mean more than it really means; I prefer "paradigmatic". But insofar as it refers to a kind of subliminal appeal to the psyche, I'm on board with it. As soon as I saw the quo...

Here's what we know so far about thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump's attempted assassin, via the BBC : Thomas Crooks had not been carrying ID, so investigators used DNA and facial recognition technology to identify him, the FBI said. . . . Crooks worked in a local nursing home kitchen just a short drive away from his home, the BBC understands. Right away, this is a big difference from pretty much every successful or unsuccessful attempted assassin from John Wilkes Booth onward. They didn't want to hide their identities; they wanted their names out there. Most lived flamboyant and unstable lives without steady employment. Booth was a famous actor well known for his Confederate sympathies, and he made no attempt to conceal his identity or motives -- he leapt onto the stage at the Ford Theater after shooting Lincoln, after all. Charles J Guiteau , who assassinated President James Garfield, had a disorganized career as a failed writer and political advocate, but his ide...

🚨 Joe Biden has once again REFUSED to take a single question from the media, and announces he’ll be having yet ANOTHER address to the nation tonight This time, it’ll be from the Oval Office Biden is DESPERATELY trying to score points here. pic.twitter.com/xyXnMJjpAp — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 14, 2024 I double checked the president's schedule , just to be sure I didn't get anything wrong: he addressed the nation from Rehoboth at 8:00 PM Saturday night, then again at 1:30 yesterday afternoon, and he spoke yet again at 8:00 PM last evening. At the afternoon remarks , "We don't yet have any information about the motive of the shooter, we know who he is," the president said Sunday, without naming the suspect, who was identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper after opening fire. "I urge everyone, everyone please, don't make assumptions about his motives or hi...

One story that's been at the back of my mind since I started this blog is the Jason Bourne series of neo-noir movie thrillers, and as the details about Trump's attempted assassination have trickled out, I keep wondering how I might try to fit them into a Robert Ludlum style plot. Let me say from the start that this is pure speculation driven by an overactive literary imagination. We have Joe, an elderly, shallow, and self-absorbed president who's been propped up by the organs of state security since his time as vice president -- and as best we can determine, his son, a dissipated drug addict, has been one of his closest advisors since that time as well. Even while Trump was in office, the organs of state security coordinated an effort to impeach Trump on Joe's behalf; since Joe came into office, the same organs assisted the January 6 "insurrection" investigation and either conducted or assisted a series of criminal indictments and civil actions designed ...

The impression, possibly fostered by Fr Schmitz and his Bible in a Year podcast, has been forming in my mind for a while that belief in space aliens is a form of idolatry. It's been enough to make me put a limit on the shows I watch on History that cover the subject. Here's an example of what's begun to bother me, an episode of Ancient Aliens that aired Aug 26, 2022 : Ancient cultures around the world often referred to the gods as the "Immortals" - but could they have encountered extraterrestrial beings that had achieved eternal life? And if these visitors genetically engineered the human race, as Ancient Astronaut Theorists suggest, is it our destiny to become immortals as well? Note how quickly the story elides from archaeology through sci-fi to immortality, which is the province of religion -- if we somehow believe strongly enough that the ancient aliens were immortal, then maybe we can live forever ourselves, or sorta-kinda something like that. Nobody ...