Remember The Hospital Ships?

During March 2020, the hospital ship Comfort was ordered to New York, and the Mercy was ordered to Los Angeles as part of the federal government's initial response to the COVID pandemic. On March 16 of that year, President Trump declared a national emergency, and under the theme "15 days to slow the spread", he endorsed the quasi-national lockdowns ordered by state and local health departments, which famously lasted much longer than 15 days. The moral panic took firm hold, although within a fairly short time, the public was made aware that the model under which the lockdowns were ordered and the hospital ships dispatched was "so highly flawed it never should have been relied upon for policy decisions to begin with."

As the "morning after" phase of the panic slowly dawns, we're gradually learning details of how the authorities tried to cover up the consequences of their initial policy errors. Yesterday's New York Post carries this story:

A US Navy admiral begged the Cuomo administration to send patients to the nearly-empty hospital ship docked on the Hudson River during the height of the pandemic — but his pleas were met with politics and paranoia, The Post has learned.

. . . Another federal facility was set up in the Jacob Javits Center in midtown. Both famously sat mostly empty during their time of operation — with city, state and federal officials blaming each other for the issue at the time.

But in a trove of recently unearthed government emails obtained by activist Peter Arbeeny and provided to The Post, a frustrated Vice Admiral Mike Dumont urged the Cuomo administration to act.

The problem was that in fact, there weren't enough COVID patients to go around, because the Imperial College London model of the pandemic wildly overpredicted the number who would be hospitalized. This was the reason Trump, on the recommendations of his COVID advisers, dispatched the hospital ships in the first place.

“We could use some help from your office,” [Adm Dumont] wrote in an April 7, 2020 missive to Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa. “The Governor asked us to permit use of USNS COMFORT to treat patients without regard to their COVID status and we have done so. Right now we only have 37 patients aboard the ship. Further, we are treating only 83 patients at the Javits Events Center.

. . . The Comfort arrived to much fanfare in New York City on March 30, 2020. New infections were spreading out of control, hospitals were overflowing with patients, and supplies were so short, first responders were reduced to wearing garbage bags.

I think it would be more accurate to say media was reporting new infections out of control, hospitals overflowing with patients, and short supplies. For instance, in early May 2020, there was a frenzy of reporting that the City of New York was forced to store bodies in refrigerated trucks, but a year later, the trucks and bodies were still there, not because the morgues were overwhelmed, but because the city had lost touch with relatives to get instructions on their disposition. By mid-May, it was plain that sending both the Comfort and the Mercy to New York and Los Angeles had been unnecessary from the start:

Though Mercy arrived in Los Angeles – and sister ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) arrived in New York City – amid concerns that local hospital systems would be overwhelmed with COVID cases and need additional capacity to support the high patient load, that need to lean on the hospital ship never materialized. LA-area hospitals ultimately only sent 77 patients to the ship over six weeks. The Mercy MTF performed 36 successful general, orthopedic and plastic surgeries, as well as interventional radiology, exploratory laparotomy and skin grafting procedures.

Even if there was finger-pointing in New York over how few patients wound up in the Javits Center and the Comfort, the situation in Los Angeles with the Mercy was exactly the same. Even so, local politicians continued to try to stoke panic with each renewed COVID surge:

A Los Angeles County supervisor is appealing to California’s governor to request a Navy hospital ship return to the city’s port to help hospitals battling COVID-19.

In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA County’s fourth district Supervisor Janice Hahn said hospitals in Los Angeles are reaching a “breaking point” due to the amount of coronavirus cases and asked Newsom to request hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) come to the city’s port.

. . . The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hahn’s request.

The House Republicans intend to hold some type of investigation into the COVID panic, but I'm not sure if we'll ever get a clear picture of what actually took place. For now, it seems plain that the Navy quickly determined that sending the hospital ships was an epic fiasco, but it kept the matter quiet, and its medical staff doesn't seem to have been anxious to insert itself into any higher-level policy discussion. Admiral Dumont, who seems to have had some part in this belated revelation, waited until he'd been retired for more than a year.

Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In 't

Has anyone else noticed that recently, every time John Kirby appears at a White House press conference, Karine Jean-Pierre stands at his shoulder? This appears to date from a kerfuffle last September, when according to the New York Post,

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was left stunned Friday when a reporter asked if his frequent briefing room appearances meant that he was the “second press secretary” and undermining Karine Jean-Pierre, the first woman of color to be chief White House spokesperson.

The head-turning inquiry came from Cameroonian journalist Simon Ateba — who was selected by Jean-Pierre to ask Kirby a question, despite previously sparring with Kirby on a similar topic.

Note that according to the Post, the moment was scripted.

“The reason I’m asking is because almost everywhere I go, I have black people telling me that the reason you’re at the White House is to undermine the first female black [press] secretary,” added Ateba, of Today News Africa.

. . . “If anyone gets any kind of idea in their head that I’m taking away from Karine or her work that’s really regrettable,” Kirby responded to Ateba.

“And I’m very sorry that that’s any impression that anybody would have. I am simply working at the National Security Council on national security communications — and with her good graces, I’m able to come up here every now and then to talk to you about simply national security issues,” Kirby continued.

Kirby's response sounds as if it was pretty tightly scripted too, and almost immediately, we began to see a lot less of Adm Kirby (checking Wikipedia, his naval career and rise to rear admiral was entirely via positions as a public affairs officer, so I don't feel all that sorry for the guy -- he basically just looked good in an admiral's suit.)

In the photo above, where they let him out again on a very short leash to address the UFO ballons, he looks tired and unhappy. In the wake of revelations that the UFO balloons were student science projects and hobby exercises by middle-aged white guys, his job was to obscure that:

[T]he Biden administration is still assessing the three unknown objects, and White House National Security Council Director of Strategic Communications John Kirby said Friday they might never know what the objects were.

"I can’t sit here and promise you that we will get to that level of fidelity and detail," Kirby said, noting "a lot of it" would depend on when and how officials recover the objects.

Kirby said "it is going to be very difficult to find them" given the conditions of the locations where the objects were shot down, and said it would also be difficult to "do the forensics to identify" them.

"I can’t promise you that we’ll know definitively, one way or the other," Kirby said.

Well, that's because the balloons are about 36 inches in diameter, their payloads are nothing but small circuit boards, and the half-million dollar missiles that shot them down basically reduced everything to a little cloud of corn flakes, if that. Any effort at recovery was pure kabuki. The Mounties seem to have been the first to get real about this, likely because Biden can't order them to do anything more:

“After conducting an extensive search in the Lake Huron area with the assistance of the Canadian Coast Guard and other domestic and international partners, a decision was reached to suspend the search due to several factors including deteriorating weather and the low probability of recovery,” the RCMP said.

I had a boss once who, in response to some corporate ukase, came up to me with it and said, "Were you ever in the military? If you were, you know about bullsh*t. Well, this is bullsh*t." Somehow I think Adm Kirby's expression in the photo above reflects this, but again, he's made his own bed here. So he's going to say nothing to contradict the author of last Sunday's bullsh*t, presumably out of professional courtesy:

The U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to U.S. intelligence experts.

Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: "I'll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven't ruled out anything."

But they did feel the need to put Adm Kirby out for something.

Karine Jean-Pierre says the U.S. military shot an object over Canada "because it's part of NORAD. There's, uh, the NORAD is part of like a, part of a—it's a, it's a, what you call, a coalition, a consortium."

"We did it clearly in step with CANADIA." pic.twitter.com/X1CmWnR2ns

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 12, 2023

He wasn't out there to explain anything at all, he was just there to fill in time without the risk that Ms Jean-Pierre would embarrass herself yet further. I'm sure that's yet another factor in the admiral's facial expression.

Here's my current theory. Somehow in the general panicked muddle at the White House as members of Biden's own party criticized his non-response to the Chinese spy balloon, somebody brought up the hundreds of hobbyist pico balloons traversing the country at any given time. Whoever brought it up hadn't thought it through all that clearly, but may well have made the point that we don't shoot those down, do we? And Trump did nothing about those, either! He knew all about them and did nothing!

President Brandon seized on that point. Probably without understanding the underlying issue very well at all, he decided on a show of strength, not only was he going to shoot down the big Chinese ballon, he was going to take a hard line on all those little balloons that Trump did nothing about. I'll bet that everyone in the room, from the national security director on down, knew exactly what those little balloons were, and so did the F-22 and F-16 pilots who were ordered to shoot them down. (They could be court martialed for giving their real opinions.) For that matter, so did the Mounties tasked with making a token search for the debris, but at least they could quickly but politely bow out. Every last one of them knew it was bullsh*t.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines spoke briefly on the suspected Chinese spy balloon controversy during an appearance at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Haines, who oversees the U.S. intelligence community, remarked on how “crazy” the situation has become in the past couple weeks.

“It’s so crazy. It’s really like an episode of ‘Veep,’ you know, on some level,” she quipped, referring to the HBO political satire show that starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

It's crazy because nobody at that level has any credibility. And that's because some kids working on scout projects and middle-aged white guy hobbyists have made monkeys out of them without even meaning to.

I briefly thought someone like Secretary Austin could fix the problem by making a good-humored offer of reimbursement for the balloons, but that leaves out the question of who'll pay for the $2 million worth of rockets that shot them down. The problem is beyond simple remedy, because it was micromanaged by the guy at the top. But this, yet once more, is not the product of dementia. This is Hunter's dad and Jill's husband. However wacky, there's method in it.

The Domestic Terrorists Behind The UFO Balloons

Via the New York Post, this is a photo of members of the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, which has at least provisionally claimed responsibility for the UFO brought down by an Air Force F-22 over Yukon Territory. (Grammatical side note: certain areas, notably Ukraine, are incorrectly paired with a "the". It's correct to refer to geographical areas that don't correspond to state entities with that designation, as "the Rockies", "the Caribbean", and so forth. However, to say "the Yukon" is incorrect, as it is a definite government entity, as is Ukraine. We don't say "the Arizona".)

Here's a thought experiment. The NIBBB has a website and appears to be an incorporated group with a bank account, among other things. What if the US Secretary of Defense were to have an aide contact the NIBBB and, purely as a public relations gesture, ask the NIBBB to tell him what their balloon cost and offer to reimburse them from the Secretary's personal funds? No need to write a personal check, just pay the amount to the Defense Department and have the DoD write the check.

In fact, it appears that the what the NIBBB calls pico ballooning has become a well-recognized sub-hobby of ham radio. The NIBBB says of itself,

We’re licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowing us to communicate to other Hams throughout the World. Pico meaning small, we send a small transmitter, with GPS tracking and antenna on a balloon filled with Hydrogen, rising to 47,000 feet, and travelling with the speed of the Jetstream. As we travel, our GPS is able to locate our current location, and other information is gathered depending on what chips we have on our transmitter while using other programs to gather other inflight information.

In other words, the NIBBB is only one of what appear to be many pico balloon hobby groups that operate under federal license, with the status and position of each balloon tracked and fully available to the public (and of course the military). Thus, of the three UFOs that were shot down by F-22 or F-16 and half-million-dollar missiles over the past week, they were each in fact fully identifiable as such at the time, with their positions known at least to their sponsoring groups. Thus, although the NIBBB has claimed responsibility for the Yukon balloon, there are presumably two other groups that are just as capable of claiming responsibility for theirs.

In fact, further exploring the NIBBB site, I learn that another site called SondeHub already tracks every such pico balloon, and a page on the NIBBB site shows that such balloons already operate fully within federal regulations, and due to their small size and very light weight pose no hazard to aviation.

So, why can't Secretary Austin have an aide do what he can to contact all three groups, ask them what their balloon outfits each cost, and offer to reimburse them from the Secretary's personal funds? From what I read, the most expensive balloon outfit, complete with transmitter package, costs in the low three figures. My guess is that Secretary Austin could make that up by foregoing a few five-star restaurant lunches and stopping by Burger King instead, which might be good for him anyhow.

Other photos on the NIBBB website suggest there can be few more wholesome activities. I won't link to them here, because they show minor children working under parental supervision on what look to be school or scout projects.

But there's a bigger question. According to Aviation Week,

“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” says Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a Silicon Valley company that makes purpose-built pico balloons for hobbyists, educators and scientists.

The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.

. . . Aviation Week contacted a host of government agencies, including the FBI, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Security Council (NSC) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for comment about the possibility of pico balloons. The NSC did not respond to repeated requests. The FBI and OSD did not acknowledge that harmless pico balloons are being considered as possible identities for the mystery objects shot down by the Air Force.

“I have no update for you from NORAD on these objects,” a NORAD spokesman says.

Pico balloons, in short, are completely legal, individually licensed, operate within federal regulations, on that basis are no potential harm to aviation, and are comprehensively tracked. Efforts by both the group that sponsored one such balloon and a manufacturer in the industry to contact the relevant agencies and explain what they already should have known were ignored, and at least so far, none has acknowledged what the "UFOs"were other than to make a glib assurance they weren't military or something.

Wouldn't a good-humored acknowledgement, apology, and offer of pro forma reimbursement go a long way here? And maybe even go so far as to suggest they're gonna ease off on Catholic trads and school board protesters? Maybe FBI Director Wray could publicly deliver one such check and announce the FBI was gonna push the reset button.

Just a thought.

The Focus Switches To The University of Delaware -- But What Are They Looking For?

In yesterday's news:

On March 13, 2017, less than seven weeks after concluding his second term as vice president, Joe Biden announced the founding of the Biden Institute at his home state’s University of Delaware (UD). According to the announcement, part of Biden’s “vision for the institute is an annual conference at UD, similar to the World Economic Forum or the Aspen Institute.”

. . . Prior to hosting the Biden Institute, UD had never disclosed any funding from China. One year later (and just two months after the Penn Biden center opened its D.C. office), anonymous donations from China to UD skyrocketed. The first payment came in April 2018 in the amount of $3,204,070 from an anonymous donor in China. In December 2018, another anonymous donation from China arrived for $1,869,515. A third anonymous China-linked payment, for $624,904, arrived in December 2019.

In 2020, the year that Biden was campaigning for president, anonymous Chinese state-linked entities sent three more payments totaling $1,005,761 to UD, the bulk of which arrived after Biden had been declared the president-elect.

In this morning's news:

The FBI raided the University of Delaware twice in recent weeks while probing President Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents, but didn't find any secret papers.

A source familiar with the investigation told CNN that agents and investigations carried out two searches on two separate days at the college in Biden's home state.

No classified material was found, the Wall Street Journal later reported.

Separate batches of materials retrieved from the university were taken from at least two different locations at the school and are now being reviewed by the FBI.

DailyMail.com revealed earlier this month that the business partner of the president's son Hunter Biden was tasked with moving archives to the university in 2010. The documents Eric Schwerin was moving were sensitive enough to require the involvement of White House lawyers.

It looks like the Biden Institute in Delaware was, or is, basically just a clone of the Penn Biden Center, about which the same questions have arisen:

[T]here is growing concern about how donations to UPenn from foreign countries reportedly tripled in the two years after the Biden Penn Center opened. The Washington Free Beacon reported most of the $61 million in gifts and contracts between 2017 and 2019 came from China, citing records from the Department of Education. Republicans and others have long warned of Biden’s potential for conflicts of interest, especially with the multi-million dollar dealings of the president’s son Hunter involving China and other countries.

But from the sketchy information we have, the problem is something beyond just classified documents, since the FBI in some recent searches like the ones in Delaware didn't find any of those, but nevertheless took others that "are now being reviewed".

And let's recall that Biden personally hired M Patrick Moore, Jr, a Boston law firm partner and former White House counsel under Obama, during 2022 to perform unspecified work at the Penn Biden Center, in the course of which he ran across classified documents. It's gradually become known that this led to a much more elaborate effort to sort the situation out, which was initially concealed from the public:

. . . emails released Friday due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Bloomberg, show the Archives secretly coordinating with and accommodating Biden’s personal attorneys to retrieve classified records. The emails also show questions were raised about whether classified materials were also stored in Boston and Philadelphia.

The initial reason or cause for the search at the Penn Biden Center by Biden’s attorneys remains unknown.

But whatever the reason, the search keeps widening, and it looks to me as though the focus isn't necessarily on classified documents. Not only that, but

What’s also interesting about this report is that it appears to have been leaked to multiple news organizations by “two senior law enforcement officials,” in the words of NBC. So someone wants us to know this was going on, even if the White House isn’t telling us.

And let's keep in mind that M Patrick Moore, Jr, who represented Biden personally in the Penn Biden Center project and had some Penn Biden materials shipped to his Boston office, quietly withdrew from representing Biden soon after the classified documents case went public last month. Something is bothering some people, but we have no idea so far what it is.

What Was COVID?

I subscribe to COVID skeptic Alex Berenson's Substack, and it's worth noting that pretty much his entire take on COVID from Day One has been vindicated. The whole regime, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, no church, school closures, work-from-home, universal vaccination and universal boosters, has proven not just ineffective but in many cases counterproductive. Overall public health in terms of life expectancy and the effects of delayed non-COVID care has declined. Is it over, tbough? I'm not sure. One thing I've noticed is that the little stickers and calibrations on sidewalks and floors that reminded people to stay six feet apart have largely disappeared.

This suggests to me that there was a program to power wash them away at some point, probably in the middle of the night, but I went looking for web images of the process on the web -- just a guy in municipal coveralls, say, with a spray wand whooshing away the footprint stickers from a sidewalk -- and came up completely empty. "No matches for your search," no matter how I tried to word things. Apparently the algorithm says this never happened.

Anyhow, Berenson's latest post is working toward a summing up, and while I think this is premature, he makes some worthwhile points:

I had coffee yesterday with someone who’s been a behind-the-scenes Team Reality advocate since 2020 - a doctor who figured out early on that Covid’s risks were far overblown. No, not Jay Bhattacharya , though as it happened we also talked yesterday and the conversation confirmed this one.

We should be optimistic, this doctor said. People get it now, no one’s taking the vaccines, it’s over. (He’s a surgeon, not an epidemiologist, thus his sunny demeanor. It takes a special kind of confidence to cut your fellow humans open. Plus surgery, unlike public health, actually works most of the time.)

And you know what? He’s right. Half-right, anyway. The Covid jabs are dead. All over the world people are voting with their arms. Fewer than 1 in 100 Americans will get an mRNA jab this month.

But the threat that Covid exposed is not over. Not the threat of the virus, which had an average age of death of maybe 82 or 83. Not even the threat of government orders like school closures and lockdowns. Those are awful, but they’re reversible and we seem to have rejected them resoundingly, at least in the United States.

No, I mean the scientific threats that the pandemic has exposed. Covid has revealed how out of control the public health establishment and its handmaiden virologists and immunologists have become. Drug companies too, although their corruption of medicine is less of a surprise.

But was any of this deliberate? Was it all cooked up, say, by Big Pharma to prop up their bottom lines? I don't think so. I think the whole episode was accidental, and the various government responses were adventitious, made up as they went along, and the remedies adopted were almost exclusively bad. If the unspoken motto was Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste, the responses of those charged with not wasting the crisis depended on what each group saw as its particular interest.

I agree with Berenson that one part of the threat was "scientific", but only insofar as a particular interest group bases its claims to authority on "science". As Dr Fauci put it, "Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on Science". But "science" as he and his supporters defined it was secularist materialism, and the accidental crisis allowed a particular influential group of public materialists to pursue a specifically anti-religious agenda, insisting that "science" required closing houses of worship for the indefinite duration, or failing that specifically, strict liturgical limitations on singing, congregation size, serving food, shaking hands, and so forth.

I don't think the goal was ever fully articulated or even fully thought through, because the whole crisis, while manufactured from the start (remember the scary expanding red circles on all the news shows from February 2020 onward?) never had the bvenefit of a central plan or overall objective. Big Pharma got on board only several months in when somebody thought maybe there could be vaccines, and then someone else thought the government should maybe be the one to buy them and make everyone get a shot.

Although the US legal system proved fairly robust in ending the most extreme restrictions on churches, they still aren't completely back. People have been slow to return, and of those returning, some number continue to feel the need to wear masks, which were never effective. There's much less shaking hands at the exchange of peace, and the Los Angeles archdiocese still hasn't returned to distributing wine with the sacrament, even though the alcohol content never made it unsafe.

Although Alex Berenson is a COVID skeptic, he also seems to be a secularist at heart, so he sees the aggrandizement of the public health establishment in the name of "science" as the worst effect of the crisis. But because there was no single agenda behind it -- it was seized on independently by separate opportunistic interests -- some effects will last longer than others. The footprints and calibrations on the floors and sidewalks are already mostly gone, but companies and governments are still havintg a hard time getting people back to the office.

The Pistol In The Dumpster Revisited

Lost in the weekend's news about UFOs and space aliens was this item, covered best as usual in the UK Daily Mail:

The Secret Service has been accused of a 'cover-up' over its alleged involvement in a police investigation when Hunter Biden's lover dumped his gun in a trash can near a school in 2018.

Judicial Watch, a justice watchdog nonprofit, announced on Friday that it received 487 pages of Secret Service (USSS) records over the incident, and says the documents cast further doubt over the agency's claims that it was not involved.

Hunter's lover and brother's widow, Hallie Biden, left his .38 handgun at the top of a trash can at Jansens supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware in October 2018, sparking a police probe.

The reemergence of the story is due to new confirmation of Secret Service involvement in the cleanup, even though Joe was out of office at the time, and Hunter wasn't a protectee as a family member. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch obtained Secret Service communications on the matter:

A flurry of internal emails began on October 29, 2020, when a website called the Blaze published an article about Hallie throwing Hunter's gun in a supermarket trash can.

One official emailed another in the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division a link to the article.

Another official, whose name is redacted, responded: 'Oh dear…'

After reading the article, one Secret Service Protective Intelligence Research Specialist wrote to their colleagues: 'It's kind of odd that we were involved in the missing gun investigation when neither Hunter or Joe were even receiving USSS protection at the time? Hmmm.'

But when this sort of story treats each incident in isolation, it leaves out important context. During the entire period of the affair between Hunter and Hallie, both were heavy users of cocaine, and Hunter's sister, Ashley, who presumably would know, characterized both as "addicts". In the months before the pistol in the dumpster episode, Hunter had been in and out of rehab. According to the New York Post,

Hunter Biden begged his sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden for cash to check himself into rehab just six weeks before purchasing a handgun — and attesting on federal forms that he had never used or been addicted to drugs.

A shocking, 4-minute, 30-second recording was discovered by The Post on a copy of the infamous hard drive Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, and emerges the same week federal agents said they believe they have enough evidence to charge him for making false statements in order to buy the .38-caliber pistol.

. . . In the days before the call, Hunter Biden appears to have completed a course of rehabilitation at The View. The center typically charges $4,000 daily. Hunter’s uncle Jim Biden, however, managed to secure him a bargain rate of $2,500 per day.

His time drying out doesn’t appear to have worked; the points plea came during a period of reportedly extended drug and alcohol use.

“I hesitate to write you this. Because your response is unpredictable. But I can’t help but to plead to you to get well,” Hunter’s sister Ashley Biden wrote to him on Sept. 1, 2018. “Our father is devastated. And his personality has fundamentally changed without you by his side,.”

During this period, Hunter's life appears to have been disintegrating. As I noted in this post, Hunter and Liz Secundy, Hallie's sister, signed a one-year rental agreement on a town house that July, but the relationship among the three seems to have been a menage, since by October, he seems still to have been living with Hallie as well, and it was she who put the pistol in the dumpster. According to the New York Post, Hunter said this on his laptop:

“Then when the police the FBI the secret service [sic] came on the scene she said she took it from me because she was scared I would harm myself due to my drug and alcohol problem and our volatile relationship and that she was afraid for the kids,” he said.

But whatever law enforcement arrived on the scene, and even though Hallie's fear was for the kids, nobody seems to have called child protective services to get the kids out of that environment -- which would be the usual consequence of discovering addicted and alcoholic adults with children and guns in the household.

Then, shortly afterward, according to The Sun,

President Joe Biden’s son, 52, lashed out at Hallie, 47, after claiming to have discovered a designer Hermès box containing what appears to be drug paraphernalia and hard drugs at her home in Wilmington, Delaware.

, , , Two weeks after the gun incident, Hunter texted Hallie the pic of what appears to be a huge crack cocaine rock on top of the Hermès box.

By January 2019, Hunter's laptop showed him in a sensory deprivation tank at Blue Water Wellness in Newburyport, MA, although whatever rehab regimen was in force there didn't keep him from taking hits from a crack pipe while in the tank.

Just one month earlier, Hunter had texted his dad, Joe, complaining he didn't have enough money for the treatment program on top of bills and alimony.

'Hey dad I've been trying to resolve some immediate financial issues - alimony tuitions and my bill for this program but the cash I am counting on will not arrive until the end of the week.

'Is it possible to make me another short term loan in the same amount and I will send it back no later than 10 days.

'I'm really embarrassed to ask and I know it's unfair of me to put you in that position right now,' Hunter wrote on December 4, 2018.

'Hunt tell me what you need. No problem,' the future president responded. 'Ok how do you want to do this I can pay tuition directly and their housing and give you the rest.'

Biden senior messaged again on December 6 to confirm: '75 being wired today. Love.'

This is just one slice of the Hunter timeline covering the period surrounding Hunter's purchase of a gun he was clearly not entitled to have, the feckless and drug-addled efforts of his inner circle to address the problem, and Joe's continued enabling of Hunter's dissipation, not only by funding it to the tune of repeated infusions of cash, but also apparently by calling on federal law enforcement to do cleanup as well.

Interestingly, the gun shop owner involved, possibly sensing irregularities, refused to cooperate with whomever claimed to be from the Secret Service. (I don't rule out Dale Pupillo and Robert Savage III, the two former Secret Service executives who'd been eased out but were apparently then put on the Biden personal payroll. They appear to have impersonated agents in the episode at The Jeremy in Hollywood back in May 2018 as well.)

But the big question that nobody else has asked is that by Hunter's implied account on his laptop, more than one level of law enforcement was involved in tracking down the gun that Hallie left in the dumpster, and at least by Hallie's account, she was concerned for her kids. But any normal law enforcement investigation involving kids, drugs, and guns would wind up taking the kids away. That night. This didn't happen here. Why not?

Project Bluebeam

Regarding the curtrent spate of UFOs, Time reports,

Other than the first balloon, which China has acknowledged was theirs, the Pentagon doesn’t yet know what the objects are or where they came from. Asked directly, a senior military official did not rule out the possibility that their provenance could be extraterrestrial.

I have several reactions, the main one being that if these are alien visitors, they would have needed warp drive-style technology to get here, given their likely home planet would be hundreds or thousands of light years away. So an obsolescent F-16 with a heat-seeking missile can shoot one down as it piddles along at 20,000 feet? This doesn't even fit the War of the Worlds model of alien invasion. According to Wikipedia,

The main narrative begins when an object thought to be a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the narrator's home. The narrator discovers that it is an artificial cylinder. Some Martians emerge briefly, but have difficulty coping with Earth's atmosphere and gravity. When humans approach the cylinder with a white flag, the Martians incinerate them. Military forces arrive that night.

. . . The next day, the narrator takes his wife to safety in nearby Leatherhead. That day, he sees a three-legged Martian "fighting-machine" (tripod), armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the poisonous "black smoke". Tripods have wiped out the army around the cylinder and destroyed most of Woking.

. . . [The narrator] begins to go mad from his trauma, finally attempting suicide by openly approaching a stationary fighting machine. To his surprise, he discovers that all the Martians have been killed by an onslaught of earthly pathogens, to which they had no immunity.

H G Wells was a 19th-century bourgeois optimist, and, a Darwinian, he saw the force of natural selection overcoming the evil of alien invasion, even though the aliens had a temporary technological advantage. But if the mysterious cylindrical or octagonal objects drifting over Canada and the Great Lakes are from aliens, they seem to be slow and bumbling, they don't fly all that high, and they so far don't seem to have a heat ray.

The YouTube commentator Mark Dice raises the issue of Project Bluebeam, something I hadn't heard of before:

The premise is that government will use a manufactured threat of alien invasion to create mass panic and impose a social agenda. If that's so, they aren't even at the H G Wells/Orson Welles level of inducing it -- but wait a moment. Mark Dice doesn't even mention COVID. As we ever so slowly transition to the morning-after phase of the COVID mass panic, we're gradually being told that the vaccines were ineffective, and even more recently, study after study has confirmed that masks were ineffective as well. In fact, those studies were being published throughout the period of lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distance. Here's one from 2020:

A cloth mask or face covering does very little to prevent the emission or inhalation of small particles. As discussed in an earlier CIDRAP commentary and more recently by Morawska and Milton (2020) in an open letter to WHO signed by 239 scientists, inhalation of small infectious particles is not only biologically plausible, but the epidemiology supports it as an important mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. . . . We also worry that the public doesn't understand the limitations of cloth masks and face coverings when we observe how many people wear their mask under their nose or even under their mouth, remove their masks when talking to someone nearby, or fail to practice physical distancing when wearing a mask.

Even so, the authors carefully hedged their position, insisting that since masks themselves were ineffective, ever more stringent lockdown and distancing measures were the real solution. No doubt this allowed them to keep their jobs despite their heterodox views. Notwithstanding the unsupportability of the public health establishment's claims, even at the height of the pandemic, the narrative was maintained.

What we're learning from the Twitter files and other sources is that an elaborate social mechanism was in place to enforce the norms of the moral panic, and only now, three years later, are we beginning to recover. Over the weekend, our Roman Catholic parish had a fundraising dinner, and our pastor during brief remarks suggested that in many ways, the process of getting back to normal worship life was only beginning. Looking back at the first months of 2020, a key focus of the public health agenda was to prohibit religious gatherings of any sort, indoor or outdoor, prohibit singing or responsive worship, forbid the distribution of food in any religious context, and eliminate hymnals, prayer books, and missals.

In hindsight, these efforts, done in the name of "science", were misguided and ineffective; luckily, sustained legal effort was able to defeat them fairly quickly, although as our pastor pointed out, only now, and only gradually, has the parish been able to recover something as routine as post-Sunday mass coffee hour. I don't rule out that, given even the hokey UFOs we're now seeing at the Plan 9 Fron Outer Space level, the authorities might intend to resume their attack on ordinary institutions in the name of "science".