It almost feels like May, and that means it almost feels like normal life might begin to return. In celebration, here is a virus-free Five Quick Things.
1. Joey Fingers finally begins to get his due (not really)
All of a sudden, after months and even years of completely ignoring some quite credible allegations that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her by jamming a finger where it did not belong, Tara Reade is finally getting some measure of satisfaction.
Which means so is the public, particularly the segment of it that was quite surprised at the willingness of our legacy media to believe the quite obviously fabulist allegations of Christine Blasey Ford and others against Brett Kavanaugh.
Of course, Reade, as a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, is upset that the fact her story is finally getting traction after Biden has been made the Democrats’ apparent nominee for president this fall. One sympathizes, but not too much — Reade says she could never vote for Donald Trump, which is perfectly fine, so long as her story rightfully turns lots of people away from being able to vote for Biden.
She’s miffed that her story didn’t make the rounds when there were 20 other candidates in the race. The guess here is none of that would have mattered. That party nominated Hillary Clinton, after all; it’s very clear that today’s Democrats don’t believe scandalous behavior is disqualifying in a presidential candidate. Sexual assault, corruption, treason, spirit cooking, Satanism — there is no limit to what’s acceptable so long as the basic political sacraments of wealth redistribution, abortion on demand, and obeisance to Beijing in matters of trade and culture are observed.
Or so it appears. Biden is the guy, whether Tara can stand it or not.
This is fine. A broken-down political claiming horse with an advanced case of dementia and a closet full of skeletons is precisely the opponent Donald Trump needs this fall.
Sorry, Tara, but nobody cares that he’s Joey Fingers. At least not yet. See you in October, though.
2. All of a sudden, ufologists aren’t nuts anymore.
Last week, in case you missed it, the Pentagon released three videos showing that, yes, it has proof there really are things in the sky that it can’t explain.
As the Daily Caller‘s Greg Price noted, though, “We literally confirmed the existence of UFOs today and nobody gives a sh*t.”
You would have thought this was the biggest thing ever, after all those decades of pilots and others self-censoring rather than reporting having seen these unexplained phenomena, for fear they’d be made into figures of fun, loons or otherwise, and after all of the pop-culture and junk-science exposure of the UFO phenomenon.
And yet, not much.
Your author will not vow to write long columns devoted to unidentified flying objects, or to prove little green men were captured at Roswell and taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, or to plunge deeply into the mysteries of Area 51. Ufology has done more to discredit itself than the government ever has.
All that said, if you know any pilots, military or otherwise, you are bound to hear stories of those unexplained phenomena popping up in the skies around their planes. They might be unidentified flying objects, but it appears they aren’t all that uncommon.
Maybe now, without the resultant circus-sideshow fanfare the UFO enthusiasts have concocted for so long about Martians and ET, a real investigation might begin into these phenomena and some progress made on the question what the pilots so often see in the skies.
My grandfather had a worthy quote on the subject — he reckoned that if our society had progressed to the point where we could put a man on the moon, it was hardly out of the question for another society on a different planet a few hundred years ahead of us in technology could bring someone here. But that supposes there is another planet capable of hosting such a society, and that in the vastness of the universe that planet would be close enough that getting them here was possible. We are very, very far away from any planets capable of sustaining life as we know it, and for all the years we’ve been sending out radio signals in hopes of contacting intelligent life elsewhere you would have thought someone might have responded.
Which doesn’t mean those UFO’s aren’t real. Clearly they are. They just might not be what the ufologists think. They might not be spaceships after all, though if they aren’t the actual explanation could end up even more mind-blowing. Or if there are little green men out there, it probably isn’t good news for us.
Maybe a virus-free 5QT wasn’t such a good idea after all. Nevertheless, we’ll press on.
3. Does anybody care if Justin Amash runs for president as a libertarian?
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: Seriously, no.
4. Mike Flynn, back in.
His ordeal isn’t over just yet, but Mike Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell is claiming that a recently surfaced trove of documents “proves Mr. Flynn’s allegations of having been deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents.”
It would really be nice if the Flynn matter was finally cleared up by the Justice Department admitting he was wrongly charged and settling a civil suit in order to make Flynn whole for all the money he’s had to pay in legal fees. The man did nothing wrong, his career and livelihood was ruined, and he was branded a criminal, simply because President Trump nominated him as his national security adviser in the middle of a planned coup against a duly elected president.
It’s an outrage this case is still unsettled in 2020. Trump shouldn’t have to pardon Flynn — the federal government should have already gone away and left him alone.
Things like this erode the public’s faith in our government, you know. Those who plotted against Trump didn’t care about that. Let’s hope it’s that crowd, rather than Flynn, sweating out the federal legal process going forward.
5. Thank you, Netflix, for The Last Kingdom
If you’re into historical fiction, I probably don’t even need to tell you about The Last Kingdom, Season Four of which dropped on Netflix on Sunday.
I’m done with the 10 episodes of the season already, and thus begins the long wait for Season Five.
There isn’t a whole lot in The Last Kingdom that qualifies as accurate history. Some of the characters in the show were real, though their interactions are much-fictionalized. As a matter of entertainment that doesn’t matter a whole lot — the main character, a Saxon nobleman named Uhtred of Bebbanburg who has roots on both sides of the conflict the show centers on, the invasion of ninth-century England by Danish Vikings, is terrifically played by Alexander Dreymon, and the story drags the poor warrior through a never-ending ordeal of battles, betrayals, and bad breaks. There’s nonstop action and continuous political intrigue as the king of Wessex, which is the last kingdom not conquered by the Danes, attempts to forge an England out of the hodgepodge of seven principalities the Danes knock over like bowling pins. Uhtred, whose life ambition is to retake his family’s ancestral home at Bebbanburg, better known as Bamburgh Castle in Northumbria, keeps getting dragged into the politics of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and the other tiny kingdoms, and he’s dragooned into service to defend them against the Danes again and again.
The show is great. If you need a good binge to keep yourself from losing it during the current malaise (of which we will not speak in this space per the promise above), give the whole thing a look.
