WHO IS DENVER RIGGLEMAN?

On 60 Minutes last night Bill Whitaker interviewed Denver Riggleman, who was a technical adviser for the House Select Committee investigating the 6January2021 attack on the Capitol. He was in charge of making sense of digital clues, and using more than 2,000 text messages provided to the committee by President Donald Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, he deciphered a roadmap to an attempted coup. Said Riggleman:

The "a-ha" moment for him came when his team discovered the White House switchboard connected a call to a Capitol rioter's phone on January 6, 2021.

Riggleman is not your ordinary staff member, for he served one term representing Virginia in the U.S. House, and is a Republican, or maybe today was.

He was a member of the House Freedom Caucus.
He lost his bid for re-election in 2020, even though he was endorsed by Trump.
Previously he served in the U.S. Air Force for 15 years, and was an intelligence officer.
While he has been called a Big Foot scholar, he said that no one is dumb enough to think this is real.
When he was in the House, he was the only member of the Republican party to speak on the floor against QAnon.
He thinks the Republican party in Virginia is broken.

With all that background and baggage, he was hired on 6August2021 to serve as a senior staffer for the House January 6 committee. He left that position in April of 2022 to help the people of Ukraine in their war against Russia.

He was interviewed by CNN's Anderson Cooper on 2June2022, and was criticized for discussing the work of this House special committee. Notwithstanding, he went on 60 Minutes with what Riggleman said was irrefutable proof of a plot to overturn the November 2020 presidential election. Not sure why this second appearance has made such an impact, for he essentially said the same thing nearly four months ago. Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was intimately involved in these text messages. One line of fear was that the Supreme Court was thus also a partner in the coup. In short, Riggleman's initial bemusement about what was happening turned to horror.

In any case, the Select Committee staff since the departure of Riggleman ran down more leads, and this whole story will be presented at Noon EDT on Wednesday. Ginni Thomas will not be interviewed for this hearing, but that link will in time be an important part of the attempt. She was in the crowd surrounding the Capitol on January 6, but left before the attack. The Committee has email correspondence involving G. Thomas with Donald Trump, John Eastman and Mark Meadows in the planning and promotion of that event.

Well, Ian is finally a hurricane, and will rapidly intensify into a Category 3, strike western Cuba early Tuesday morning, strengthen further to a Category 4, and weaken a bit to now strike the Florida panhandle.

However, for the past week I've been hinting that there could be a fork in the road as shown here:

However, at this time there is no hint of a leftish turn towards New Orleans. Ian is a large storm, with a diameter of around 500 miles.

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

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