In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Back when Megyn Kelly was being eased out at Fox with a consolation book deal, having failed at her assignment to bring Trump down, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse began calling her MeAgain. It looks like those days are back. At 1:20 in the video above, she embeds footage of a supposed New Jersey "drone", which is clearly a commercial jet. If nothing else, the roar of the engines gives it away. The Jerseyite comments, It looks likea a [redacted] triangle. They look like a traiangle. Er, that's because of the swept wings the jet's lights are mounted on. In a later sequence, another Jerseyite says, It looks like a spaceship, right? Like, that doesn't look like a drone, right? . . . It's like a small plane, it really is! It's like a small plane. These are all drones in the sky. Well, somebody better get on the case if all these drones are disguising themselves as planes! Megyn adds, All these are going from dusk to arou...

I'm not sure if the New Jersey drone frenzy is starting to die down or not. It looks as though sightings aren't oing viral, they're still focused mostly on New Jersey and neighboring states, even though airliners in landing patterns and helicopters are common all over the US. A quick web search brings up just a few sightings in exurbs well east of Los Angeles, but none in LA City or County. I think there may be a good reason for this. Our house is located on a low hillside overlooking Hollywood and Downtown, and in particular, if we look out the windows at night, we see helicopters, lots of them, all over the city. There are police, medical, traffic, news, and private helicopters, all the time. They are mostly far enough away that we don't hear them. Everyone in LA knows about helicopters and is used to them. Nobody is going to take them for drones, and it looks as though nobody is calling them in as drone sightings. The video I've linked at the top of this p...

NEW: NewsNation reporter says his entire view of the New Jersey drones has changed after he witnessed 50 of them flying from the ocean. The drones are reportedly the x 8-10 feet wide and can’t be detected because they don’t give off heat. “I gotta be honest here. You know when this… pic.twitter.com/2tVGasw2bc — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 14, 2024 The X post above embeds footage from NewsNation reporter Rich McHugh. showing various drone sightings he and his cameraman captured in his neighborhood in Monmouth County, NJ. This is some of the most explicit video we've seen so far of this phenomenon. From his narration, he locates his position a few miles west of the naval ammunition depot at Earle, NJ, which is at Sandy Hook, and he says there's a body of water behind him, which would be Raritan Bay, which is also adjacent to Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens in New York City. This suggests to me that he's standing near the west end of Raritan Bay, around maybe ...

I keep thinking there's got to be a great New Jersey joke out there with a punchline involving drones, but I just haven't found it yet. Maybe Gutfeld will tell it when he comes back from wherever he is. (Full disclosure: I grew up in New Jersey until I was 15, when my family moved to Bethesda, of all places. I guarantee you, there are no Bethesda jokes. Nobody would dare.) The fact that the only people seeing these drones are in New Jersey, though, keeps me from taking these reports as seriously as I otherwise might, but on the other hand, there's John Kirby pooh-poohing the whole thing from the White House: "Using very sophisticated electronic detection technologies provided by federal authorities, we have not been able to, and neither have state or local law enforcement authorities, corroborate any of the reported visual sightings," he said. "To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings a...

Let's take a quick tour of this week's AI news. Despite all the potential AI-enhanced tools at law enforcement's disposal, such as DNA, facial recognition, phone and GPS location, and even genetic genealogy, Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was caught by low-tech ordinary citizens at a McDonald's in Altoona, PA : “Don’t that look like the shooter from New York?” one of the regulars, who only gave his first name, Larry, recalled his friend joking. “He probably heard us,” Larry said of the man seated maybe 10 feet away in the back, near the restrooms of the fast-food restaurant in Altoona. All joking aside, Larry’s friend was correct: That man turned out to be the wanted fugitive suspected of calmly pulling out a pistol with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and gunning down the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in a brazen assassination that gripped the nation. A worker behind the counter used a ...

Much of the second-guessing so far over the Harris cmpaign has come from the left, arguing that it should have brought racial identity and Marxism more to the fore, which were what the working class really wanted, or something like that. Via Real Clear Politics, one such piece from The Nation unintentionally stumbles on a worthwhile insight. No, Kamala Harris Staffers Did Not Run a “Flawless” Campaign : Quentin Fulks told Pod Save America , “We were honestly in, in crisis management mode of keeping President Biden in the race.… Trump’s favorability numbers were creeping up as Plouffe said, and we had to do something about that as well. And so it was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but there really was no sort of contingency planning to turn the race over to her right after that debate or at any point until President Biden definitively said he wasn’t going to continue on.” The fact that there was no contingency planning even after Joe Biden’s horrendou...

The Atantic, which let's recall is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, #8 on Forbes's 2023 list of the world's richest women, is worried that Trump is starting to look normal : [W]hat is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing. Donald Trump is filling his administration with “loyalists,” a prerogative that his opponents have grudgingly accepted as his due. Yet he is defining loyalist in maximal terms, including the belief that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election and was justified in his attempt to seize power. The winners are rewriting the history of the insurrection, and their version of history is about to acquire the force of law. But isn't the election just past a vindication of the view that the 2020 election was "stolen"? Look at the efforts that began almost immediaately after 2020 to drive a stake through Trump's heart, the second impeachment of a lame duck, the January 6 prosecutions, the lawfare, incl...