In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Next year is an election year for LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, and he's been increasing his public profile. He says of himself, he is the first Spanish-speaking sheriff in the county. In 2018, retired sheriff’s lieutenant Villanueva defeated incumbent Sheriff Jim McDonell, becoming the first to unseat the incumbent in over 100 years. Sheriff Villanueva also became the first Democratic Sheriff in LA County in almost 140 years. But he isn't that kind of Democrat. As sheriff, he's elected to countywide office independently of the county supervisors, and he's frequently been at odds with them, as well as the LA City mayor and council . When L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva arrived in Venice earlier this month in a cowboy hat promising to clear its famous boardwalk of homeless people, he seemed to surprise just about everybody. After all, Venice is the LAPD’s jurisdiction. Chief Michel Moore was among those caught off guard. “I did not invite the sheriff ...

Dr Fauci had an extended interview yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” where he displayed irritattion at his critics in a pattern that emerged last week when he said of Tucker Carlson and others, "I'm trying to save lives and the people who weaponize lies are killing people." Yesterday, he expanded on this: BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted. FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator? BRENNAN: Do you think that this is about making you a scapegoat to deflect– DR. FAUCI: Of course- BRENNAN: –From President Trump? FAUCI: Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out. BRENNAN: Well, there are a lot of Republican senators taking aim at this. I mean– FAUCI: That’s OK, I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying. BRENNAN: It just, it seems, another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life a...

The map with the scary flashing red circles was all the rage in early 2020, and it was on the news shows along with predictions of mass graves in public parks. It was based on the Imperial College model, which was almost immediately discredited, and even the media got tired of it around the time the hospital ships in New York and LA harbors were sent back to port. All of a sudden, it looks like the lizard people want to bring back the old panic. And a panic, or an attempted stampede, is what the Omicron variant appears to be . What a small world we live in. The “Nu variant” scare you keep hearing about is coming from the same people and institutions that spawned the last COVID scare, and the one before that, and the one before that one, dating back all the way to the onset of COVID Mania. . . . Just as with previous ruling class-fomented bouts of Hysteria-19, there is no statistical cause for alarm over this new strain, which is one of over 100,000 mutations of the coro...

Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, we all got an emergency alert on our cell phones: "City of LA: COVID cases are spiking. Get vaccinated/tested now." My immediate thought was to ask if I'd missed something -- as far as I knew, cases in the county had been slowly declining for months. I went to my computer and pulled up the graph above. Yup, same old same old. Somebody at emergency management decided maybe they could panic half a dozen people into getting the shot that way, huh? This is a completely irresponsible way of abusing the emergency alert system, which should be used only to notify people of wildfires, flash floods, and the like. If you cry wolf once too often, people don't take you seriouly. So over the holiday and yesterday, the big headline at all the aggregators was WORST EVER MUTATION! VACCINE RESISTANT! STOCK MAKET DRIOPS 1000 POINTS! This is panic porn pure and simple, and I guess the world was ready for it if LA City was broadcasting stale ale...

The other day, I ran into a piece by David French on Jonah Goldberg's Dispatch newsletter, " The Moral Collapse of America's Largest Christian University ". Up to now, I haven't given David French much thought. All I knew about him was that, as a writer for National Review, he briefly mulled running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, making him a never-Trumper. Poking around the web, I saw that he's now, like David Brooks, a contribuing writer for The Atlantic, as well as Senior Editor for Goldberg's Dispatch and a columnist for Time. Yet Wikipedia says of him , David Austin French (born January 24, 1969) is an American political commentator, theologically conservative traditional Christian, and former attorney who has argued high profile religious liberty cases. The "theologically conservative traditional Christian" part puzzles me. Here's what he has to say about "Christians" in the Dispatch st...

President Biden channeled Marie Antoinette yesterday: "For the hundreds of thousands of folks who bought one of those electric cars, they’re going to save $800 to $1000 in fuel costs this year,” Biden said, referring to the $112,595 electric Hummer pickup he test drove at a General Motors factory in Detroit earlier this month. The least expensive new electric car is the 2022 Nissan Leaf, with a starting price of $28,375. You can get a used Leaf cheaper, but they're still more expensive than comparable gas-driven cars. But not many people currently suffering from high gas prices will come out better, since trading in a gas-driven car will bring a new, higher car payment no matter what. Another issue is vehicle range. Available models start at about 100 miles, which for many commutes is a single round trip. Recharging can take from 30 minutes to 12 hours, so you can't just swing by the corner gas station to fill up. Longer trips other than commutes are problematic...

As an Aristotelian, I look for causes. We don't have a whole lot of insight for now into the "final" cause of Darrell Brooks Jr's crashing a very snazzy red Ford Escape into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade on November 21. It sounds as though he may have been fleeing another crime scene, or a fight, and it's hard not to speculate that drugs may also have been involved. But that's less important for now than the "efficient" cause, for which we have some informed insight. Brooks is the entirely predictable product of a political- and social-media driven effort to address crime by pretending that it doesn’t exist. To present criminals — particularly black criminals — as victims. To pay no meaningful attention to actual victims — who overwhelmingly are black themselves. . . . Brooks, however, is a depressingly familiar type. He had been released on nominal bail Friday after being charged Nov. 5 with domestic abuse, resisting an officer, s...

I was doing some research into the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and ran into this passage at Britannica : Because of the hopes aroused in 1918–19, the fact that no far-reaching plan for securing public control over industry or for breaking up the big landed estates was carried through had two consequences. First, although the German working class undoubtedly improved its political and economic status under the republic, a considerable portion of it was embittered by the failure to effect drastic reform of the social and economic systems. This disenchantment was to provide the left-wing opposition with strong working-class support, which weakened both the Social Democratic Party and the republic. This brought to mind Whittaker Chambers's observation that as of the 1920s, German was in fact the language of international socialism, and Germany was the locus of the movement. My takeaway from the link above is that the German working class at the time had clearly articulat...

Last week I ran into a 2018 paper by the Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction as a Pure Bourgeois Revolution , in which I found a stimulating perspective on the current political situation, which I think represents a counterrevolution by the elites allied with the Lumpenproletariat , white climate activists, and pansexualists, against "Trumpism" a populist alliance of the working and middle classes that is in fact multiracial. (These are precisely the people David Brooks sneers at, though he also finds them "terrifying".) Guelzo's paper has also appeared on YouTube as "Reconstruction: The Last Bourgeois Revolution": After last year's election, my attention was drawn to the US presidential election of 1876, that was disputed and resolved by an electoral commission that produced the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to the Republican Rutherford Hayes while effectively ending Reconstruction by withdrawing Union troops from ...

I ran into a couple of almost comical passages in the current Atlantic piece by David Brooks that I linked yesterday. He disparages the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. (It should be just "Toqueville, not "de Toqueville", by the way, unless you have "Alexis" in front of it. There. That's off my chest.) Later, he says, Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else—on the public square. Self-aware Christians know this. The first observation to be made here is that Brooks is at best fuzzy on Christian taxonomy and isn...

My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and in fact we must have been among the last people ever to have a rabbit ear antenna on top of a tube TV. This meant we mostly watched PBS, The News Hour, and thus inevitably David Brooks. When we finally got cable ten years ago, we quit watching any news, and we forgot about David Brooks. The last I heard of him, he was admiring the crease of Obama's trousers, and Obama was courting him and George Will as influential conservatives whom he could coax over to his side. Somewhere yesterday I saw a link to an essay by him in the Atlantic , "The Terrifying Future of the American Right". I went to look at it and discovered he's a contributing writer who publishes there regularly. I guess this says something about The Atlantic, the New York Times, and PBS. I guess it also says something that I'd been ignoring him all this time and don't feel like I've missed a thing. I did read his Bobos in Paradise when it cam...

These remarks by Leader McCarthy on the occasion of the House censuring Rep Gosar for posting an anime indicate that at least some people are beginning to catch on to what's happening. The Speaker's world is effectively coming to an end. This ties in with another guiding principle I've been relying on in recent weeks, Stein's Law, That Which Cannot Continue Must Stop. If we begin with the question of Speaker Pelosi's future, we've inevitably got to come to the question of President Biden's plans. My view continues to be that he isn't suffering from dementia, and thus he must have some understanding of his political predicament. This story gives some suggestion of what that predicament is and what must be effective cooperation with his handlers: We reported Wednesday on the embarrassing story of how President Joe Biden’s handlers had scrapped a so-called “Three Amigos” press conference that had been scheduled to take place today between him,...

Via Gateway Pundit, which I don't normally trust, I nevertheless found a transcription of a Fox reporter's remarks on Bret Baier's podcast: Just to kinda let you guys in on a little secret here. I was told, you know, about two to three weeks ago–maybe this pertains to the Supreme Court, maybe this pertains to, you know, changing the ticket before you get into 2024. You know, FDR, seemingly, he burned through a vice president almost every, every time he was up for office. But I got an email from somebody who really knows this place very well who said, “Chad, start to familiarize yourself with the confirmation process just not in the Senate but the House for a vice president.” Of course, we’ve not gone through that since, you know, President Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller. Again, as you know, Bret, I’m always playing defense and preparing for things like that, but I was very surprised to get that very cryptic email just a couple of weeks ago. Chad Pegram's bio ap...

There's a lot of gossip about a rift between the White House and Vice President Harris, to the extent that a trial balloon is being floated about kicking Harris over to the Supreme Court, to replace her under the 25th Amendment. Up to last weekend, of course, the 25th Amendment scenario had been intended for the big guy himself, not Kamala, who in the received scenario would replace him. To me, this says we're edging closer to the Spiro Agnew solution, the two-shoe drop, where the non-entity veep is replaced under the 25th Amendment by someone with gravitas who can credibly succeed a Nixon once he's forced out. Nixon, recall, simply resigned. Nobody needed either impeachment or the 25th. The only remotely perceptive commentary I've seen on the developing situation is from Chris Cillizza : Remember that when Biden ran for president, he purposely cast himself as a sort of bridge candidate for Democrats -- holding the office until some of the party's you...

I posted on Saturday about one unintended consequence of COVID social engineering, which is a labor shortage. It seems to me that conditions imposed by the government forbidding people to earn a living or perform other routine functions must inevitably have unintended consequences that are yet to be fully recognized. For instance, the lockdowns closed schools longer than they closed workplaces. The effects of this are only beginning to be felt. So I saw in yesterday's Washington Examiner: The pandemic has taken a significant toll on the desire for high school students to pursue higher education, a new study shows. Less than 50% of high school students are interested in four-year colleges, a decrease of over 20% from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, a new survey reported. . . . Though 86% of students reported feeling pressured to attend university , most expressed concern about the cost. Six out of 10 respondents worried about how they ...

Back in August, I posted on my theory of President Biden's mental condition , based on a speech he gave at the time. A more recent speech, the Veterans' Day ceremony where he made his "great Negro at the time" gaffe, just confirms my thinking. He isn't suffering from dementia, he's just drunk all the time. It seems to me that this fits the available evidence without multiplying the entity of requiring a medical diagnosis. A clip with the full context of his remarks about Satchel Paige is in the link above. The first thing to note about it is, as I noted last August, the slow and careful delivery to avoid slurring throughout. But when he gets to the "great Negro" part, he still can't follow the teleprompter. At about 0:37, he says, "the great Negro at the time" and immediately corrects himself, "pitcher in the Negro league", but in making that quick correction, he starts to slur. But at that point, he catches himself and ...

I've kept thinking about the current headline that record numbers are quitting their jobs , while lower-level openings are harder to fill. The biggest thing I noticed last year was that once the lockdowns closed the barber shops, fewer of them reopened. I asked my barber about this when I went in for a haircut yesterday. He noted that his shop has an empty chair, and they were trying to get someone in to take it over, but so far had been unable. I asked if this was due to the lockdowns. He said yes, he thought that once barbers were prevented from earning a living, they simply had to look for other options, and they wound up liking those options better. He cited a barber who'd worked in that shop but had a sideline of selling vintage clothes. He could keep running the sideline during the lockdown, and once he focused on it exclusively, he earned enough to quit working as a barber. A local restaurant has had a NOW HIRING COOKS sign out for months. I read that restaurant wor...

When the story about Ashley Biden's diary broke last weekend, I had a feeling it wasn't going away, notwithstanding its contents, the incoherent, vaguely allusive jottings of a deeply troubled drug addict, are of no probative value for much of anything. But that the FBI would be involved in harassing Project Veritas over something or other in connection with it is effective acknowledgement of its authenticity. In fact, I think if nothing else, it's also confirmation that the big guy is dumb as a rock -- nobody would touch the story during last fall's campaign, and if the FBI hadn't been sicced on James O'Keefe last week, the whole thing would have stayed forgotten. Now, with the matter in court , it's an ongoing narrative. Dumb as a rock. The most-referenced passages have the author ruminating over being sexually active and hypersexualized at an early age, with one clear factor being "possibly inappropriate" showers with her father. This...

I've just had new confirmation for my view that journalists across the spectrum have the mental capability of promising eighth graders. This piece by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, which I take to be part of the never-Trump right, New Dem mission: Dump Harris? , makes this assertion: Actually, party leadership has no real way to “engineer the removal of a vice-president,” not unless the VP wants to leave. Vice presidents are elected to their positions, so they cannot be fired. The 25th Amendment only applies to presidents, not vice-presidents, so there is no mechanism to remove a VP for incompetence or any other reason. Except Spiro Agnew didn't want to leave, but he left. I did a find on "Agnew" in that piece, and Morrissey doesn't mention him at all, which suggests to me that he's furrowed his brow with great effort and completely forgotten about, or maybe never even knew about, the one historical case where party leadership engineered the removal of a vi...