In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Corporate media's take on the polls channels the Achilles Paradox : in logic, an argument attributed to the 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher Zeno, and one of his four paradoxes described by Aristotle in the treatise Physics. The paradox concerns a race between the fleet-footed Achilles and a slow-moving tortoise. The two start moving at the same moment, but if the tortoise is initially given a head start and continues to move ahead, Achilles can run at any speed and will never catch up with it. Zeno’s argument rests on the presumption that Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise started, by which time the tortoise will have moved ahead, even if but a small distance, to another point; by the time Achilles traverses the distance to this latter point, the tortoise will have moved ahead to another, and so on. This is, of course, absurd. The link continues. Aristotle’s solution to it involved treating the segments of Achilles’ motion as only potent...

I wasn't sure I was going to post on Bossgirl Gretchen Whitmer's skit with the Doritos and the kneeling influencer, but the response of Michigan's bishops set me to do it. For most of my life, Catholics, especially the bishops, have basically apologized for being Catholic, and they've never really objected to even the most offensive portrayals, like Tom Lehrer's " The Vatican Rag " (1965): A spoken introduction describes the song as a response to the "Vatican II" council—which, among other things, broadened the range of music that could be used in services—and humorously proposes this rag as a more accessible alternative to traditional liturgical music. The song begins: First you get down on your knees Fiddle with your rosaries Bow your head with great respect And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect! The lyrics mockingly list a number of Catholic rituals such as confession, the Eucharist, and Rosaries, and suggest the irony of...

*TRUMP INTERNAL POLLING: TRUMP LEADS IN ALL BATTLEGROUND STATES pic.twitter.com/PPQnSsryDp — Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) October 10, 2024 A few people are starting tgo say it: Election tilts toward Trump as suspicions grow that some polls may be masking true size of his lead , Harris currently leads Trump by 2.0% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, with 49.1% support to his 47.1%. That figure includes a Rasmussen Reports survey showing Trump with a two-point lead, a Reuters/Ipsos survey showing Harris up two, a Morning Consult poll with Harris up five, a Yahoo News poll with the race tied, and a number of other surveys. A New York Times/Siena College survey showed Harris up three points. Actually, as of this morning, Harris's RCP lead is down to 1.8%, having been at 2% or more for many weeks. But as I've been saying all along, the national average is meaningless, since it's the Electoral College that casts presidential votes. And Sean Trende at R...

Tampon Tim and Doug went to a coffee shop, walked away from the counter without paying, and left Tim's daughter to inform the cashiers that a handler will be coming to pay with a credit card. Just like every middle class person does lmfao. pic.twitter.com/a95EK7gyU0 — Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 9, 2024 A number of aggregators picked up the story yesterday of Second Dude Doug Emhoff and Tampon Tim Walz on some kind of joint campaign stop at the Otro Cafe in Phoenix, AZ. The focus was mostly on how they ordered drinks, didn't pay, and didn't leave a tip, with Walz's daughter forced to reassure the people at the counter that "someone" would soon make good the bill. The whole context, though, had me scratching my head. The Otro Cafe is referred to in some of the stories as a "pastry shop". I looked it up on Tripadvisor , which says it supports Vegetarian friendly, Vegan options, and Gluten free. Is this a bro thing? I asked Wikipedia : ...

Last week I looked at Second Dude Doug Emhoff's legal career and began to match it up with Kamala's rise in politics. One thing stood out. According to Wikipedia , He opened his own firm with Ben Whitwell in 2000, which was acquired by Venable LLP in 2006. Emhoff became managing director of Venable's West Coast offices. . . . Emhoff joined DLA Piper as a partner in 2017, working at its Washington, D.C., and California offices. He earned $1.2 million per year as a partner of the law firm. Following the announcement that his wife would be Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 United States presidential election, Emhoff took a leave of absence from the firm. After the Biden–Harris ticket won, the campaign announced Emhoff would permanently leave DLA Piper before Inauguration Day to avoid conflict of interest concerns. He married his second wife, Kamala, in 2014, while she was Attorney General of California. In 2016,she was elected to the US Senate as a sen...

An article in yesterday's City Journal fleshes out a litrtle more on the coordination between the federal government, NGOs, staffing agencies, and local power players that's behind the sudden migration of quasi-legal immigrants to places like Charleroi, PA, but it really doesn't add much that's new. First, there's the federal government: [T]he White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country. The article then immediately skips to NGOs while only briefly recognizing that it's the federal government that's using the NGOs to pass through funding (less ...

Whatever the specifics of whose fingerprints or DNA might be on the baggie of cocaine discovered in the White House in summer 2023, as I noted yesterday, there's been a revival of interest in the case. I decided to go after the key questions not from the forensic evidence, which we may never learn, but from what we know about the nature of cocaine addiction. (I've never used it -- according to Wikipedia, the US cocaine boom started in the late 1970s, after I'd outgrown my undergraduate drug use in the 1960s). As of July 7, 2023, I was already leaning in the direction that the baggie was Kamala's : [Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino] made the point that "protectees", that is, the president, vice president, and members of their families, are escorted past all checkpoints by Secret Service special agents, in part because the agents carry firearms that wouldn't get past metal detectors. For others, the checkpoints include drug ...