Biden And The Trans Agenda

One of the "incredible transitions" President Biden has sought most consistently to impose on US society is far-reaching accommodations for transgender people, an extremely tiny part of the population not even supported by much more numerous gays and lesbians, who insist they're attracted instead to same-sex people based on their existing sexual identity and don't want any sort of makeover, surgical, hormonal, or cosmetic.

Recent examples include implementing transgender-friendly airport screening procedures on the Transgender Day of Visibility last April, including unspecified "changes to scanners used for screening. . . . intended to make procedures less invasive". As far as I can tell, based on scanning images I see on media, they currently show very little flesh of any sort. but the concern appears to be that what minimal shadowy outlines the scanners now reveal could still establish that the frumpy middle-aged woman going through security is actually a frumpy middle-aged guy. So we block all that out, or something.

Yesterday, the Biden administration announced proposed changes to Title IX:

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the proposed changes would completely eliminate the concept of gender-specific sports and spaces, such as restrooms and locker rooms, and would allow students to freely use whichever facilities they feel like. The new regulations would also label any instances of someone not using proper “pronouns” as sexual harassment.

The proposed changes will effectively abolish sex-separate activities and spaces, including bathrooms and locker rooms. They would also define misuse of gender pronouns as a form of sexual harassment.

. . . "A shift from biological sex to gender identity means that girls and women will be forced to accept the presence of biological males in what have always been single-sex spaces." said Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for Parents Defending Education.

The frumpy middle-aged woman at the top of this post is Jennifer Pritzer, a member of the wealthy and influential Pritzger family, the first transgender billionaire. A little-noticed article that came out recently in The Tablet provides disturbing insight into the well-financed and well-organized plan to impose the transgender agenda on everyone:

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

The author says she has

stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans. . . is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

The piece goes on to detail the history and extent of Pritzker family philanthropy, in particular to introduce and normalize the entirely new concept of SSI into universities and medical schools. The programs involved can be truly bizarre:

[Jennifer} Pritzker’s philanthropy is also active in Canada, where Jennifer has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists.

The conclusion to draw here is first, that the imposition of SSI is a well-organized and well-funded agenda; second, that it's top-down, driven by the Pritzgers and apparently other wealthy families. It's worth noting that other progressive developments since the 1800s have been at least nominally oriented toward the working and middle classes -- social insurance, collective bargaining, college financial aid, or civil rights. This, on the other hand, is supported by billionaires on behalf of perceived injustices toward a tiny and ill-defined group, and indeed, the implications -- ending sexual segregation in school restrooms and locker rooms, for instance -- are wildly unpopular with the working and middle classes.

Another detail worth noting is that the SSI agenda isn't completely separate from the new COVID-based public health agenda. The most prominent transsexual in the US government, of course, is Dr Rachel Levine, who prior to her appointment as Assistant Secretary for Health imposed some of the most restrictive lockdown measures in the US as Pennsylvania state secretary of health. Jennifer Pritzger's cousin, Illinois Gov J B Pritzker, also imposed extreme lockdown measures there, some of which were removed by the courts.

But here's the big question: why is Scranton Joe, the putative champion of the working class, so firmly attached to this agenda? He's managed to become most closely identified with transgenderism/SSI and the Green New Deal. SSI in particular isn't a vote-getter; it isn't even popular with the traditional gay and lesbian Democrat base. I can only assume there's money involved, big money, over and above the political process.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

Recently published remarks by Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit editors have drawn a lot of controversy from conservatives, including conservative Catholics. I discussed his remarks about Ukraine the other day, which as a conservative Catholic I find unobjectionable. Today I want to look at the problem of what he calls in his remarks "restorationism":

[T]he Council that some pastors remember best is that of Trent. What I’m saying is not nonsense.

Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of “restorers” – for example, in the United States there are many – is significant. An Argentine bishop told me that he had been asked to administer a diocese that had fallen into the hands of these “restorers.” They had never accepted the Council. There are ideas, behaviors that arise from a restorationism that basically did not accept the Council. The problem is precisely this: in some contexts the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes a century for a Council to take root. We still have forty years to make it take root, then!

So, of whom specifically does the Holy Father speak? Well, a prominent conservative Catholic has piped up and given us an example. Anthony Esolen on Monday published an essay, "I Am a Restorationist". As a Catholic convert, I've got to say this presents me with a dilemma in my understanding of Catholicism. In his remarks, Pope Francis makes it clear in so many words that "restorationists" have never accepted the Second Vatican Council. As the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, his opinion on this matter should carry great weight.

The idea that there are Catholics who haven't accepted the Second Council isn't a figment of Francis's imagination. Prof Esolen has simply stood up and, apparently fully accepting Francis's terms, identified himself as one of them. That a conservative US Cathollic magazine would publish this essay simply confirms Francis's observation that there are many "restorers" in the US, i.e. people who do not accept the authority of an ecumenical council.

As Bp Barron has said, you don't get any higher authority in the Catholic Church than an ecumenical council. You don't find any clearer voice in the Church than a pope endorsing an ecumenical council. So for a prominent conservative Catholic to come out publicly to say by clear implication that he's against an ecumenical council and against the pope is, at minimum, problematic.

In fact, recognizing that Esolen is an Ivy Leaguer who has made his career as an academic, I would expect a closely reasoned, heavily footnoted case in support of his position, but this is precisely what we don't get. His argument, as far as I can piece it out, is that in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholics obeyed the Church's authority without question, but look where it got them:

When our pastor removed the marble communion rail with its mosaic inlays of Eucharistic symbols (a basket of five loaves, two fish, a bunch of grapes, the Lamb of God), we figured he knew what he was doing, and we submitted. When he whitewashed the church walls, eliminating stenciled patterns of the fleur-de-lis, so that what had been warm and shady was now bare, with no color connection between the stained-glass windows, the mural paintings of figures from the Old Testament, and the painted ceiling above, we figured he knew what he was doing, and we obeyed. When he covered the hexagonal floor tiles, white and dark green in cruciform patterns, with a bright-red carpet, we wiped our feet and obeyed.

So, er, does this mean Catholics no longer need to accept Church authority? Prof Esolen doesn't like vernacular mass or versus populum celebration. Speaker Pelosi wants abortion to be OK. Who's right? He's proven absolutely nothing.

But also, his argument is, first, emotional, and second, anecdotal. We may regret unjustifiable redecoration in specific cases, and reaction may be along the line of, "My parents were married in that church! I was baptized and confirmed there! Look what they've done!" But that isn't an argument against the Second Council. The Council documents -- I've read them in an edition Bp Barron sponsored with the aim of having them available to contemporary Catholics -- have nothing to say about carpet or whitewash.

Bp Barron in his commentary there himself cites examples like a priest who rode a motorcycle down the aisle to the altar and makes the point that there have been lots of misunderstandings, which are in the process of being corrected. But here Pope Francis suggests it takes a century for a Council to take root in any case.

In many ways, Esolen's argument is post hoc propter hoc.

Sexual morality was the obvious candidate for progress. I understood nothing of it when I was a schoolboy, but when we high school freshmen had a “values clarification” class instead of a real study of Scripture or the catechism, I figured the sister knew what she was doing. It was a feature of the new Church—the Church knew more and better about sex than she used to.

Though most of us in that high school bore an old residue of moral sense, by the time I went to college in 1977, the Church in her ordinary life—in her preaching and her obvious practice—offered us no guard rails, no direction. I never thought of myself as disobedient because the Church, in her practical life, did not think of me so, either. Love pastes over a multitude of sins.

But by 1992, the Church had published a new comprehensive Catechism that contained a full explanation of traditional Catholic moral theology, including sexuality. The priests in our parish often discuss the sacrament of reconciliation, including the need for examination of conscience with reference to Church teaching. Has Prof Esolen attended a diocesan mass at all lately? Has he gone to confession in a diocesan parish? Last I checked, if I confess to a sin, the priest will still give me advice on how to avoid it and prescribe a penance before he absolves me.

The problem with Esolen's argument is that it parades out the traditionalist cliches -- tasteless redecorations, bad architecture, pride flags in the sanctuary -- without addressing them as either outliers or aberrations that are largely in the process of being corrected by a current generation of mainstream priests and bishops like, for instance, Bp Barron. Barron, a fully qualified theologian, is attacked by conservatives who have no particular qualifications as somehow a popularizer or a Bp Feelgood. (Indeed, I've had e-mails from restorationists who say the same about Fulton Sheen.)

Nobody attacks the Council documents themselves. Beyond that, the implication in their resistance to Pope Francis is that he's in some way illegitimate; indeed, the most extreme version of this position is that Pius XII was the last legitimate pope.

The problem with all this is that if Francis isn't a legitimate pope, or the Second Council was illegitimate, these are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof. If these proofs can be made, an Ivy Leaguer like Prof Esolen ought to be able to make them. But he falls back on the same old chestnuts, the whitewashed walls or carpeted floors in specific parishes, the sister who bore a child out of wedlock, the divorces, the pedophiles. But how do any of these directly illegitimize, say, Sacrosanctum Concilium? Lumen Gentium? Gaudium et Spes? Does an illegitimate Council also delegitimize the 1992 Catechism?

I'd be curious to know if Prof Esolen has even read them, or if he's read the commentary on them by Bp Barron in his recent edition. Or do the documents somehow not matter, since although Prof Esolen identifies himself as someone who rejects the Second Council, he has nothing to say about them in this version of hier stehe ich? Wouldn't a serious, well-footnoted refutation of the Council documents and, just for starters, Bp Barron's interpretation of them in his edition, be a miniumum starting point?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Reaction To The EU's Move On Kaliningrad

Media reaction to the situation in Kaliningrad has been slow. The best I've seen so far is from CNBC:

Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, commented Tuesday that “it’s fair to say that Kaliningrad is a strategic imperative for Russia” noting that defending and sustaining it certainly is.

“Russia will react for sure, the only question is what that will be ... [and] what Russia could do militarily,” he noted.

“A land attack to drive a corridor through Lithuania would be a direct attack on Lithuania triggering NATO Article 5 defence. Putin knows this - that’s war with NATO. Can Putin afford that when he is struggling to deliver on even his now much-reduced strategic objectives in Ukraine? He would also have to launch an assault through Belarus, stretching his supply lines, and splitting his forces,” he noted.

Ash suggested that Russia could seek to use its sizeable naval assets in the Baltic Sea to enforce some kind of tit-for-tat blockade on Lithuanian trade although again that would be seen as a huge escalation by both NATO and the EU. “It would then be a fine dividing line whether that would trigger the NATO Article 5 defence,” however, he noted.

When asked on Wednesday whether Russia’s response would be exclusively diplomatic or would go further, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said “the answer is no. They will not be diplomatic, but practical.”

“As for retaliatory measures, now possible measures are being worked out in an interdepartmental format. It was stated to both Lithuania and the EU through their diplomatic missions in Moscow about the inadmissibility of such actions and the need to change the steps taken and return the situation to a legitimate course,” she said.

“If this is not done, then, of course, and this was emphasized at all levels in Moscow, retaliatory actions will be inevitable.”

Following the initial announcement, Lithuania extended its ban to include highway traffic.

Yesterday I quoted Reuters concerning EU envoy Markus Ederer's visit to the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he is reported to have asked the Russians at the meeting "to refrain from escalatory steps and rhetoric". The relative rhetorical stance here is intriguing: the EU appears to be giving Putin a parental pat on the heard, telling him to calm down. As far as anyone can tell so far, Putin has few options that woud not trigger NATO Article 5, when his own military is pinned down in Ukraine while NATO's forces aren't engaged there and free to act over Lithuania and Kaliningrad if needed.

But the current Kaliningrad crisis is just a follow-on to an earlier Russian srategic loss. According to CNN:

In 2002, the EU and Moscow reached an agreement on travel between Russia and Kaliningrad, ahead of Poland and Lithuania joining the European Union in 2004. When those countries joined, the exclave became surrounded on three sides by EU territory. Russia says the 2002 agreement has now been violated.

In other words, since 2002, there's been an uneasy equilibrium on the Baltic that effectively finessed a Russian strategic loss with the entry of Poland and Lithuania to the EU and NATO. (Poland joined NATO in 1999; Lithuania in 2004.) The botched Russian invasion of Ukraine, by revealing Russian military weakness and proccupying Russia there, shifted this equilibrium out of balance and resumes the long-term trend of Russian strategic decline.

But an interim result will leave Russian satellite Belarus surrounded on three sides by Poland, Lithuania, and a west-facing Ukraine, whose membership in the EU and de facto NATO membership are inevitable. The problem for Putin is this domino, as well as others, is still to fall.

Nobody's Noticed Kaliningrad

Most of the aggregators missed yesterday's biggest story, but CNSNews had it: Russia Claims NATO Ally Lithuania Is Blockading Kaliningrad, Warns it Will Respond. Over the past week or so, I've begun to think the biggest outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be in the Baltics, and Kaliningrad has become the locus. According to Wikipedia, following its capture by the Red Army ihn April 1945,

The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it under Soviet administration. The city was renamed to Kaliningrad [from Königsberg] in 1946 in honor of Soviet revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is governed as the administrative centre of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost oblast of Russia.

As a major transport hub, with sea and river ports, the city is home to the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy, and is one of the largest industrial centres in Russia. It was deemed the best city in Russia in 2012, 2013 and 2014 in Kommersant's magazine The Firm's Secret, the best city in Russia for business in 2013 according to Forbes, and was ranked fifth in the Urban Environment Quality Index published by Minstroy in 2019.

The problem is that Kaliningrad Oblast is an exclave, Russian territory outside Russian borders. Land connections between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia must transit Lithuania. Per the CNSNews story,

A new potential flashpoint between Moscow and NATO emerged when Lithuania, citing incoming European Union sanctions on Russian steel and other ferrous metals, said those items could no longer be transported across its territory to Kaliningrad.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it summoned a senior Lithuanian diplomat and informed her Russia viewed the actions as “openly hostile.”

It said the ministry had informed charge d’affaires Virginija Umbrasiene “that if in the near future cargo transit between the Kaliningrad region and the rest of the territory of the Russian Federation through Lithuania is not restored in full, then Russia reserves the right to take actions to protect its national interests.”

. . . The governor of Kaliningrad, Anton Alikhanov, claimed earlier that the restriction would impact 40-50 percent of goods moving between the region and the rest of Russia.

. . . [O]ver the coming months more and more goods will be affected: E.U. bans on Russian imports will target wood, cement, fertilizers, seafood, and liquor from July 10; coal and other solid fossil fuels from August 10; and crude oil from December 5.

The EU disputes Russia's claim that this is a "blockade", but given the context that Kaliningrad is one of the largest industrial centers in Russia as well as a naval base, the EU sanctions on Russia will turn into a major handicap, "blockade" or not. And as of earlier this month, via an official NATO release:

Fourteen NATO allies along with two NATO partner nations, Finland and Sweden, are currently participating in the exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS 22) with over 45 ships, more than 75 aircraft and 7,500 personnel.

This premier maritime-focused annual exercise kicked off from Stockholm, Sweden, on 05 June. It takes place in the Baltic region from June 5-17 and provides a unique training opportunity to strengthen combined response capabilities critical to preserving freedom of navigation and security in the Baltic Sea. This is the 51st iteration of the exercise series, which began in 1972.

Let's ask a question here. Sweden applied to join NATO only this past May 15, and only three weeks later, they're hosting NATO's premier maritime-focused annual exercise? I'm sorry, things in the real world don't happen justlikethat. Pope Francis is no dummy when he speaks of "the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented". The Baltic is a key inflection point here, and it's been part of Western strategic thinking all along. According to Reuters,

Moscow summoned EU envoy Markus Ederer to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday. EU spokesperson Peter Stano said Ederer asked the Russians at the meeting "to refrain from escalatory steps and rhetoric".

The standoff creates a new source of confrontation on the Baltic, a region already set for a security overhaul that would hem in Russia's sea power as Sweden and Finland apply to join NATO and put nearly the whole coast under alliance control.

I'm starting to think what's really going on is that the West was completely surprised by the Russian inabiity to succeed in its Ukraine invasion, and there's been a hasty recalculation -- Russia has committed and largely squandered a major part of its military force in Ukraine, and it's now vulnerable in the Baltic and likely elsewhere. Lithuania is a NATO member and in particular has closely aligned its military planning with Poland. Any Russian military threat against NATO is now simply idle.

Putin is in serious danger of losing important Russian territory and is likely unable to do much about it. This is an interesting development indeed.

Pope Francis On Ukraine

There's been a certain amount of commentary -- at minimum, somewhat bewildered -- about Pope Francis's recent remarks on Ukraine. The full text of a wider-ranging exchange in which he made them is here. I think they should also be taken in the context of official remarks by Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State:

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, has reiterated that Ukraine has a “legitimate” right to defend itself from Russian aggression, but he also has warned that weapons being sent there by other countries could lead to a “terrible” escalation of the war.

“Ukraine is resisting Russia based on this principle,” Parolin said in a recent exclusive interview with CNA, referring to the right of self defense.

They should also be seen in the context of CCC 2309:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

I've always been impressed by the respect this shows for Clausewitz's view that chance and uncertainty, which bring guesswork and luck to the fore, play a major part in war. Thus evaluation of conditions for moral legitimacy ultimately depends on the prudential judgment of political leadership, and the conditions will always be subject to change. Consequently, there can be no black and white. The Vatican's official position leans in favor of Ukraine, but potential escalation, taking into consideration the power of weapons that could be used, could change the conditions for moral legitimacy.

I don't see how Francis's remarks contradict existing Church policy or teaching:

To answer this question we have to move away from the normal pattern of “Little Red Riding Hood”: Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad guy. Here there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys, in an abstract sense. Something global is emerging, with elements that are very much intertwined. A couple of months before the war started I met a head of state, a wise man, who speaks very little, very wise indeed. After we talked about the things he wanted to talk about, he told me that he was very concerned about the way NATO was moving. I asked him why, and he said, “They are barking at the gates of Russia. They do not understand that the Russians are imperialists and will allow no foreign power to approach them.” He concluded, “The situation could lead to war.” This was his opinion. On February 24, the war began. That head of state was able to read the signs of what was taking place.

What we are seeing is the brutality and ferocity with which this war is being carried out by the troops, generally mercenaries, used by the Russians. The Russians prefer to send in Chechen and Syrian mercenaries. But the danger is that we only see this, which is monstrous, and we do not see the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented. And note the interest in testing and selling weapons. It is very sad, but at the end of the day that is what is at stake.

It seems to me that, irrespective of any specifics Francis may have in mind, trends like the development of a pan-Baltic economic zone that I've discussed here are in fact making Putin and others in Russia uncomfortable. I've said here that I don't think either Finland or Sweden mooted NATO membership out of the blue after Russia invaded Ukraine; they perceived the need for such a thing well before last February. The invasion simply created a credible pretext. Isn't this something Francis and the unnamed head of state might credibly have discussed? Indeed, Francis is an ethnic Italian whose mind is likely to move in a Machiavellian direction, not without reason here.

So I don't see anything off with the observation that factors leading to the war were "perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented". Indeed, Francis's position is on the face of it not inconsistent with Trump's position since the February invasion, which has been that it would not have taken place if he were president. We can argue that neither Francis nor Trump understands the circumstances, but they are arguable, and indeed, it's arguable that there were good reasons Putin didn't invade Ukraine while Trump was president. These matters are well within the prudential judgment of political leaders.

Farther down, Francis makes an observation I've made here, and indeed, President Zelensky has said the same thing:

The world is at war. A few years ago it occurred to me to say that we are living the third world war piece by piece. For me, today, World War III has been declared.

He goes on to ask,

What is happening to humanity that we have had three world wars in a century?

Good question. Recall that a generation ago, US policymakers were being told history was over, there weren't going to be any more world wars. What was wrong with US policy planning that kept us oblivious? Isn't Francis asking that very question? Couldn't political leadership have anticipated developments better?

Frankly, I think Francis is underrated. In fact, I've come to like the guy.

Wait A Moment: Just How Many Laptops Has Hunter Lost?

I ask this because a new figure (at least, new to me) has been making the talking head rounds, Andrew Kerr, an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner. Kerr is currently best known for revealing a Dec. 3, 2018 recording, previously undiscovered on the laptop Hunter abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, in which Hunter rambles at length on the theme, "Yeah, my father will take any policy positions that I want him to adopt."

In at least one interview, though, Kerr suggests this isn't the only one of Hunter's laptops that's gone astray. I haven't been able to find any hard-copy piece by Kerr on the subject, but I did finally run into another piece from last summer here:

In an explicit video obtained by the Daily Mail, Hunter Biden told a sex worker back in 2019 that allegedly, Russian drug dealers had stolen his laptop that may have contained "sensitive information" after they partied with him in Las Vegas back in 2018.

The video in question — reportedly filmed via his laptop — showed the 51-year-old after a sexual encounter with the woman. Throughout the video, Biden rehashes an alleged drug fueled period of time spent with the Russian dealers. The lawyer said that he "was with these guys. The one guy was, not like you anyway… each night he'd be like 'there's going to be so many people here, crazy f***ing party' and each night it's nobody."

. . . President Joe Biden's son detailed the night that he believes his computer was taken stating, "I went out to the hot tub by myself, which hangs over the edge of the f***ing top floor, with glass, it's ridiculous. And so I'm sitting there and that's the last I remember. And I don't ever pass out, ever. I wake up and the only people that are there are Miguel, the guy frantically running round gathering things up, ok – and Miguel, and Pierce, this guy, his friend."

. . . This is when, the father-of-five began to get suspicious about the location of his device. "I think he's the one that stole my computer. I think the three of them, the three guys that were like a little group. The dealer and his two guys, I took them everywhere. F***ing everywhere, crazy out of your mind sh**," the Yale alum claimed.

If this story is true -- at least, it comes from Hunter himself -- this is an entirely separate laptop, allegedly stolen in 2018 from a Las Vegas high-roller suite by shadowy cronies with Russian connections. This isn't the same laptop as the one Hunter left with the Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked up. At about 11:21 in the interview linked above, Kerr refers to this episode and says that at minimum, the last user-updated file on the Delaware laptop is from April 2019, so that at minimum, the Las Vegas laptop, if it exists, is not identical to the Delaware one, copies of which are currently in various hands.

At about 14:11, Kerr goes on to say that Hunter had a large number of Apple devices that were also linked to this laptop, and backups for which were kept on it, so that there are potentially many more data sources available on the laptop that haven't yet been explored.

There are several questions here that are so far unanswered. One is simply the enormous bills that Hunter ran up during that legendary 2018 cocaine bender. Kerr suggersts in the interview that Hunter was moving from one $10,000 a night suite to another in Las Vegas before he eventually wound up at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. We know very little about this -- where he was, whom he was with, and especially how much this all cost. Even given his salary as a director of Burisma and the baksheesh from China, I've got to think his expenses on that bender alone far exceeded his income. Who picked up all his tabs?

Second, we already know that Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, who is said to be funding Hunter's current lifestyle and has a team of 30 lawyers investigating the abandoned laptop, seems to be the go-to fixer at this point. Just what is he up to?

And as I've already asked, even a Hollywood lawyer can't afford to pay Hunter's various tabs, bail him out of his multimillion-dollar tax problems, and hire 30 other lawyers to look into the laptop. Who's really behind this? We might hear more after the election, at least.

So, Who's In Charge At The White House?

I'm back to my theories on what's actually going on in President Brandon's brain. As I've been saying for some time, I don't think it's senility or dementia; his thinking strikes me as purpose-driven, however obscure that purpose may be. Among the recent headlines saying he's surpassed modern records for presidential vacation days, I see most recently that the Brandons are returning to the beach this weekend:

For the second time this month, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will be spending the weekend at their North Shores beach home. The couple was in town the first weekend of June to celebrate Jill’s birthday, which was June 3, and this weekend is Father’s Day.

According to the White House’s Daily Guidance and Press Schedule issued June 16, the presidential couple are leaving Washington, D.C., at 11 a.m., Friday, June 17, and are expected to arrive in the Rehoboth area by 11:55 a.m. The guidance doesn’t say when the Bidens will be leaving the area; it just says they’ll be in town through the weekend. However, the Federal Aviation Administration has issued a restricted flight-area notice that lasts until 7:15 p.m., Monday, June 20.

I submit that if the president's thought processes are organized and purpose-oriented, then here we see a good part of his purpose, which we might characterize as "avoiding work". Haven't we all known people like that? Think about Wally in the Dilbert comic, then relate him to the real-world equivalents in our own careers. Don't we see those people in Joe? Let's see how this breaks out in the policy sphere. Take a recent report from Politico:

For more than a year, Democratic lawmakers and like-minded advocates have pleaded with Joe Biden to create a “gun czar” to address the epidemic of violence.

Each time, the president’s team pushed back with force, contending it has the perfect person already in place, someone with command over the issue and extraordinary access to the president himself.

That person is Susan Rice.

. . . Her ascendence to the role of point person on guns marks the latest chunk of policy turf over which she has claimed jurisdiction, joining a sprawling portfolio that stretches from policing and racial justice to student loan debt, immigration and health care policy, including a prime piece of protecting abortion rights.

The scope of her fiefdom is as remarkable as how she managed to secure it. Having eschewed a public-facing role, Rice has relied on a combination of internal maneuvering and bureaucratic know-how to place herself at the nerve center of some of the fiercest debates roiling Washington. And she’s further cemented her status with the president in the process.

Wait a moment. Isn't Ron Klain still chief of staff? But the story doesn't mention him until farther down:

Rice’s elevated stature in the West Wing has come with fierce loyalty from colleagues and praise so superlative-laden that it borders on deification. More recently, it has led to speculation inside the White House that she will succeed Ron Klain should he leave the chief of staff post.

I think there's a subtext here. Ron Klain was supposed to be in charge -- look at this puff piece from February 2021 in CNN:

Unusually visible, involved in practically everything, and free in sharing his opinions on what has become the new administration's must-follow Twitter feed, White House chief of staff Ron Klain has emerged as the building's most central figure aside from the President himself.

His combination of deep Washington experience and long professional ties to President Joe Biden have rendered Klain one of the most powerful chiefs of staff in history, officials and those close to the White House said, one uniquely positioned to confront the parallel crises facing the nation while also channeling a President he understands implicitly.

Except now Klain is on his way out, and Politico is trying to figure out who really runs the show. The odd thing is that both the CNN and Politico stories pump first Klain and now Rice, but a couple paragraphs farther down, they discount the influence of both. For instance, in Politico:

To some former colleagues and outside advocates, Rice has come to personify a kind of risk-averse, incremental approach to policy-making that they fear falls far short of addressing the country’s needs — and will ill-serve Democrats in the midterms and elections beyond.

“Rice is seen as a domestic policy lightweight and a block to any good things that happen to cross her desk,” said the leader of one progressive organization, who asked to withhold their name out of fear of angering Rice and the White House. “So everybody who wants to do big things has a vested interest in her desk being as empty as possible.”

If that's the case, then why is Biden so closely identified with two highly controversial policies, first, the abolition of fossil fuels, and second, pansexualism, including bringing transsexuals into the mainstream, having men compete in women's sports, and radical abortionism? He's been very clear for months now that rising fuel prices aren't his fault, but they're fine anyhow, because they'll make everyone buy electric cars? Or the latest leak that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, he'll declare a national health emergency?

I think the reality here is that he isn't listening to anybody, at least nobody in a conventional political job, although the agenda he most frequently expresses is much closer to Klain than Rice. But if Klain is out and Rice is in, why isn't he backing away from killing fossil fuels or supporting transgenders on the Day of Visibility? But these positions are nevertheless neither delusional nor hallucinatory. They're this-wordly and oddly consistent with some arcane purpose, whatever that may be.

His son Hunter, of course, claims Dad listens to him. That may be more credible than theories about either Ron Klain or Susan Rice. I'm inclined to see both Hunter's advice and an overriding desire to avoid any kind of real work as better explanations for the big guy's approach to the office.