Welp.

 

Renowned defamation attorney Lin Wood has...reached escape velocity, so to speak. 

Make that formerly-renowned. 

Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood ramped up the crazy on Wednesday night by suggesting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was somehow involved in Justice Antonin Scalia’s death and part of a child-sex cult.

Wood, alongside on-again-off-again Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, has been at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s hopeless attempt to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the Nov. 3 election. Besides filing a slew of conspiratorial lawsuits alleging election fraud that have been laughed out of court, Wood has urged Georgian Republicans not to vote in next week’s pivotal Senate runoffs because of his belief that the election will be “rigged” and has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to halt the Jan. 5 election.

The QAnon-peddling attorney took things to a whole new level on Wednesday night, however, when he decided to take to Twitter and toss out a series of dangerously unhinged accusations.

“You are recorded discussing Justice Scalia’s successor before date of his sudden death. How did you know Scalia was going to die?” Wood asked Roberts in one tweet, casually adding: “Are you a member of any club or cabal requiring minor children as initiation fee?”

After painting Roberts as a murderous pedophile, the far-right attorney went further down the QAnon rabbit hole by bringing up deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, suggesting the chief justice was mixed up in trafficking children and apparently hinting that he may have had Epstein killed.

“My information from reliable source is that Roberts arranged an illegal adoption of two young children from Wales through Jeffrey Epstein,” Wood tweeted. “I think we can all agree that Epstein knows pedophilia.”

Once you pass the event horizon of derangement, it's hard to come back.

That's a genuine shame, given his record of litigation achievement before the election.

Give him another Emmy.

The Governor needs to watch football in person, so He shall watch it in person.

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

But having the imperator go to the Coliseum alone was so obviously an act of pulling rank that 6,700 select fans will also be permitted to attend alongside Andrew Commodus.

We should all be clear about the malarkey that Cuomo is spewing in an attempt to whitewash this embarrassing spectacle. He’s now describing this event as the beginning of a new program designed to “reopen business safely” as the pandemic begins to recede. Of course, there are two major problems with this attempt at public relations spinning.

First of all, there was no such plan in the works until the Bills locked up the AFC East. The entire state still hasn’t reached the point where Cuomo will allow normal service in bars and restaurants or larger outdoor gatherings (including weddings), to say nothing of packing thousands of people into a football stadium. This plan was cooked up because Andrew Cuomo himself wanted to go see the Bills play. But even he realized how horrible the optics would have been if he’d asked to be the only fan in the stadium, so he’s going to allow thousands of others to go.

The other point is that pandemic is not “receding” in New York State. At least not yet. Case numbers are rising in many counties and hospitalizations are also up. Yes, the vaccine has arrived in New York and it’s being distributed as quickly as possible, but only a relative handful of people have been inoculated thus far. The playoffs start in ten days. We’re not going to be anywhere near herd immunity by then. Even if every man woman and child could somehow get the vaccine, that still wouldn’t matter because the vaccine is given in two doses and takes up to two weeks after that for the full effects to set in. We’ve already seen a nurse come down with COVID a full week after being vaccinated.  

I have admired this Bills squad from afar this year, but I am going to have to root for a first round flameout instead.  

 

Easiest prophecy ever.

In a little over twenty one days and two hours from now, countless Catholics will cease caring about the words and actions of the President of the United States, no matter what the body count.

The message: cloak your actions in polite euphemisms and speak of compromise and these gentle folk will be satisfied.

No matter that your executive orders and legislative proposals are larded with culture war IEDs that should offend their sensibilities.

Resume regular outsourcing to China, drone the hell out of the Middle East and keep imperial outposts all over the globe for no reason: snooze bar.

And the corporate subsidiary media will be a great help in that regard, too.

The pattern of the third Obama term is already set.

Sleep well!

Dr. Fauci's Truth Problem.

The problem with paternalistic lying is that it's still lying. 

First, he lied about masks, saying they were not effective, in order to keep ordinary yokels from making a run on the supplies.

And now, he's been called out for moving goalposts on the level of vaccination necessary to achieve herd immunity.

There is another problem with lying--it makes the listener wonder what else you might not be telling the truth about.

And speaking of not being forthcoming: has anyone followed up on the bombshell story revealing the NIH's funding of "gain of function" research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

But just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.

Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.

SARS-CoV-2 , the virus now causing a global pandemic, is believed to have originated in bats. U.S. intelligence, after originally asserting that the coronavirus had occurred naturally, conceded last month that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab. Dr. Fauci did not respond to Newsweek's requests for comment.

And please note that there's a difference between "creating" and "manipulating," which is something to keep in mind when reading the "rebuttal" statements which have not actually responded to this story.

 

 

He's not wrong.

Our garbage national legislature put together a weak relief bill that failed to take into account the actual economic pain that the deliberate refusal to pass an earlier relief bill would have ameliorated.

And the President slagged the bill in a video speech, demanding more individual relief and the removal of foreign aid. No, he didn't quite threaten to veto it. Yes, he's playing the chaos agent again. And yes, he's deliberately kicking Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP in the shins.

But no, he's not wrong about the inadequacies and flaws of the package. His proposal back in October was double this thing, and if it had been passed then, we would not be seeing the widened abyss we are now. But the Custeresque octogenarian leading the House scuttled negotiations for partisan advantage (oops), so here we are. 

Is 40% of a loaf better than none at all? Small business needs the cash ASAP.

Can we get to a compromise more like three-quarters of a loaf before December 29? Because $600 isn't a much of a hedge against an ugly-looking winter.

Stay tuned.

There's a term for someone who relies on Big Tech's streaming services, cloud storage and the like.

That term is "idiot."

To wit: Bob Dylan's pro-Israel "Neighborhood Bully" is nowhere to be found on Youtube.

It's "hate speech" for the tech platform's Committee of Public Safety--and they never explain themselves.

The gatekeepers insist you follow their "Everything that is not mandatory is forbidden" policies to the letter--especially when they don't spell it out. But I suppose they don't have to--the left has made it pretty clear where Jews can expect to stand in the future. 

Not that it stops Jewish voters from pulling the lever for the parties of the left, but what can you do?

And another part of the endgame is obvious:

But the censorship is not ultimately the point. A platform like YouTube is not just a “content provider,” like a digital jukebox. It’s not an artist, which can choose which versions of which songs it chooses to make available to whom and when. It’s a ledger, on which the shared events and references that together add up to something like a social or cultural whole are recorded. Instantaneously altering that shared database based on nothing more than the half-formed political whims of whatever cadre of censors has been appointed to control the “hate speech” algorithms is the first step to controlling memory itself. I see it, and it scares me.

I'm all posted out at the moment, so I'll just meme instead.

 

 

 

 

 

Piers Anthony: A creep, or a huge creep?

 This sums it up politely. There's much, much worse to be said about his oeuvre, but this is a start.

How about another dose of economic vaccine?

The first doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been administered to frontline medical personnel in New York. A good day for Michigan-based Pfizer and for the world.

But our garbage Congress refuses to act on economic relief in the America of the second lockdowns. 

You probably haven't heard of the restaurant version of the Petticoat Junction. But its closure will be a hammer blow not only to the people who worked there, but also to the people who have for decades patronized this truck stop restaurant just outside of my hometown.

My anger with both houses of our national legislature for the posturing and slow-walking of relief is nearing nuclear fusion levels. The suffering is real, and the knowing, calculated indifference to it is the kind of behavior that destroys political legitimacy across the board. 

The deliberate destruction of livelihoods and the refusal to extend a helping hand is fertile soil for unrest. The grim sequel to 2020 beckons.

Fisher-Price did it better.

This is the Vatican's 2020 nativity scene.

Yes, it was crafted in the 1970s. 

And now for a word from Governor Blackface-or-Klan-Hood.

You wearisome godbotherers need to remember it's just a building: my god has anytime minutes and presumably your obsolescent celestial sky-dad-analogue can do the same.

Merry Christmas to you too, Mr. Northam.

This is the future Big Tech is building.

A world where slavery is acceptable so long as you adhere to HR's newest inclusivity memo.

 Hat-tip to Don and Steve Skojec for the find.

 

And now to Sports.

So Michigan's annual beatdown at the hands of Ohio State was cancelled this year because of the spread of coronavirus. 40 players wouldn't have been able to play on Saturday, which tends to do things to your depth chart.

This was truly for the best. Michigan has never looked so disjointed, out of whack and badly-coached as it has in 2020. Why Harbaugh was so eager to play this year is impossible to understand. It looked good against Minnesota...but the Golden Gophers turned out to be a shell of last year's superb team. Other than that, Michigan's play has been error-riddled, perfunctory, lifeless and bad on fundamentals.

Hard to watch, so I haven't much.

The overall body of work still looks good, but if you focus on the last three years, not so much. He has the 9th rated recruiting class in the wings, but if you can't develop them--and he sure hasn't developed a quarterback during his tenure--then it's just an empty power ranking. It would be nice to give him a dignity-saving parachute out of A2, which brings me to...

Our tragic farce of an NFL team dispatched its coach and general manager after a lifeless performance on Thanksgiving. I don't like seeing people lose their jobs as a general rule--work is essential to keeping mind and body together. And I didn't dance in the streets when Patricia and Quinn got their pink slips. But yeesh--it was deserved. Patricia's post-game conferences were the same word salad of "gonna look at the film gotta work harder at our end gotta coach better focused on the next game" -- lather, rinse, repeat for every loss. And Quinn's drafting decisions were not stellar, apart from the offensive line and finding Golladay in the third round.

Patricia's kids' summer camp version of the "Patriot Way" left the locker room grumble free, but also listless. That can be seen in last week's miracle win over Chicago: the Lions still made mistakes, but they played with energy and enthusiasm. 

The odds that Darrell Bevell is the next head coach are really low, unless the team runs the table. Not going to happen, but it least it shows that the current collection of players has some fight in them.

So, as to the long-term replacement? Mutterings about Harbaugh heading east along the I-94 are out there. And his tenure in SF was stellar, bringing a storied franchise up from the depths.

I doubt that this is likely, but it would help both, and in one fell swoop.

A guy can dream.

Always nice to see political opponents extend the clenched fist of fellowship.

Xavier "Javert" Becerra, Bane of Nuns and Compeller of Conscience, as HHS Secretary?

That Biden--what a moderate uniter! 

At least we can be assured that all those Catholic Biden supporters are sure to stand against this affront. After four years of demanding better of Trump supporters--to the point of unrelenting vitriol reminiscent of an Antifa rally--there's no way they will stand for anyone on their side who opposes their superior, full-spectrum devotion to Catholic teaching. No sir!

Right?

 

In better blogging news...

Greg Krehbiel is still blogging. Has been throughout this annus horribilis, in fact. 

Take a look here.

Dawn over Lethe.

And because even I can't live in perpetual gloom:

Lady, when your lovely head 
Droops to sink among the Dead, 
And the quiet places keep 
You that so divinely sleep; 
Then the dead shall blessed be 
With a new solemnity, 
For such Beauty, so descending, 
Pledges them that Death is ending. 
Sleep your fill—but when you wake 
Dawn shall over Lethe break.

--Hilaire Belloc, "On a Sleeping Friend."

 

Eyeing the horizon.

I to my perils
Of cheat and charmer
Came clad in armour
By stars benign.
Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man's deceiver
Was never mine.

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came. 

-- A.E. Housman