In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I keep returning to David Brooks and his thesis in Bobos in Paradise that James B Conant's educational reforms, in particular egalitarian merit-based college admissions policies based on standardized testing, created a new, meritocratic elite made up especially of suburban Jews. Other writers like Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's The Chosen have sharply challenged this view, arguing that Jewish quotas in particular persist in the Ivy League, and in any case, secretive college admissions policies allow wealthy donors, legacies, influential politicians, and others to bypass putative rules. My guess is that the 2019 USC admissions scandal, whereby celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman pled guilty to paying as much as $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into USC, is just the tip of the iceberg. But USC is not an Ivy; it's second-tier, so the actual cash value of an acceptance letter from Stanford, Chicago, or an Ivy can only be estima...

Somewhere in his book The Strangest Way, a Catholic apologetic he wrote while a professor at the Mundelein seminary, Bp Barron notes a remark by Norman Mailer about Richard Nixon, that Nixon always seemed to have a little Nixon on his shoulder whispering in the big Nixon's ear telling him how to behave, advice like, "Now look sympathetic"; "Now smile." Bp Barron said no matter how you feel about Nixon, this was a good illustration of the divided self: there's no room for authenticity; you've always got to be gauging how you're coming off to other people. (I've kept looking for this in my copy but so far have been unable to find the specific reference. If anyone knows where it is, I'll be delighted to update the post here.) But this brings out other associations for me. Mailer covered Nixon in at least two books, Miami & The Siege of Chicago and St. George and the Godfather , which were about the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns. ...

The one absolute no-no in 21st century etiquette -- surpassing all others, I think -- is to ask whether a transgendered person has had their plumbing repaired. (I assume "repaired" is the correct word, since the assumption is that the original plumbing, though functional, was incorrectly installed.) In one of the consummate gaucheries of our time, the UK Daily Mail has nevertheless asked this about the transgendered Ivy League swimmer Lia Thomas . Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal. 'It's definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,' one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview. Lia has told her teammates that she dates women. While Lia covers herself wi...

I've always been more or less aware of photos on the web of Hunter Biden posing with the big guy, often with their heads pointed in the same direction and very similar smiles as though they're in on some big joke. It's almost as if they're trying to be Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in some kind of dance routine. But looking for one to illlustrate posts in the last few days, I've come across others, like the one yesterday and the one above here that are just plain creepy and even verge on softcore porn. Here's another: Compare it to this well-known photo of Anderson Cooper and his husband: But heretofore, the usual questions about the big guy went more to photos like this: I ask which photo is creepier, the one just above or the one at the top? They both show a troubling lack of boundaries, but the sexier ones with Hunter are clearly posed, deliberate, and probably even taken by a professional photographer in a scheduled shoot. Or actually, given that Hu...

It seems like there's more and nore -- or maybe less and less, dependiong on how you look at it -- to the whole Ukraine kabuki: President Joe Biden's failure to nominate an ambassador to Ukraine more than a year into his presidency is raising concerns among U.S. officials and regional experts as Russia moves closer to launching a full-scale invasion. "President Biden has undermined the U.S.-Ukraine relationship by failing to even nominate an ambassador to Ukraine—it is a dereliction of duty and contributes to the instability we're seeing unfold today," Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, told the Washington Free Beacon. . . . Regional experts say diplomacy through social media is not helping the tense situation. A qualified American ambassador would have been able to reassure Zelensky in person and prevent a public disagreement with the White House that many saw as a boon for Russia. "It is a horrible ...

Let's look at the conventional media narrative here: Vladimir Putin, AKA Darth Vader, is threatening Planet Ukraine, part of the Rebel Alliance, with the Death Star. Princess Leia, AKA Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, has sent an urgent message to Obi-Wan Kenobi, AKA President Brandon, begging for his help against the Empire. The suspense now, although not canonical to the original Hollywood version, is whether Obi-Wan, 79 years old, is either too senile or too irresoulute to respond. Got it? Except that even an updated version of the Star Wars salvation history isn't going to explain how things are actually turning out. President Zelensky, AKA Princess Leia, appears not to be on the same page with Obi-Wan at all: Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov told reporters on Tuesday that Kyiv considers – and intelligence reports from the West agree – that “internal destabilization” caused by panic over a potential further Russian ...

Yesterday I started thinkng about Biden and Ukraine vis-a-vis Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. I realize the circumstances are only very generally equivalent, but they do represent rare and potentially consequential direct confrontations betweeen the US and the Soviet Union or its successor. My conclusion yesterday was that in 1962, Khrushchev was a weak leader with backing that turned out to be unreliable, and he was badly played by Kennedy, who had speechwriters who'd studied Cicero in Catholic school, a highly effective media operation, and a telegenic persona. It didn't hurt that he lived with his family in London from 1938 to 1940 and saw Winston Churchill at close hand. No matter there was a behind-the-scenes deal whereby the US removed missiles in Turkey that were an equivalent threat to the Soviets, that wasn't public, and Kennedy came off as the young, resolute, dynamic Leader of the Free World. From a domestic political standpoint, his handling of the c...

It seems to me that the Ukraine situation could potentially work out for Biden the way the Cuban missile crisis worked out for Kennedy. According to this article , President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis significantly contributed to his strong overall job approval scores. From the fall of 1961 until the spring of 1962, his approval ratings held steady at almost 80 percent (table 10). They then slowly, but steadily, subsided, dropping to a low of 61 percent in mid-October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis then pushed approval up to 74–76 percent from November 1962 to January 1963. Should Biden manage to appear strong and decisive and then manage to look as if he'd forced Putin to back down in some way, he'd achieve a reset -- though as the link points out, Kennedy already had high job approval, well above Biden's. On the other hand, Putin isn't Khrushchev, who was in power for about a decade before being removed, while Putin has been de facto c...

Two third-rate minds of the center right have come to the same conclusion. Glenn Reynolds, a moderate Hefnerian and a transhumanist, wrote in the New York Post, It’s time to admit it. Less than a year in, Joe Biden’s is a failed presidency. Biden knows it, the press knows it, and voters know it. And our foreign adversaries like China and Russia know it. Somehow, the cabal that put Biden in power will scheme to winkle him out of power. It is unlikely to be as straightforward as it was with Richard Nixon. Biden is not hated so much as he is held in contempt. And with Nixon, the Democrats were fortunate that his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, was corrupt in a good, old-fashioned, straightforward political way. It turns out that he liked simple brown bags, especially ones filled with cash. Agnew would have been as unacceptable as Kamala Harris, but the blatant corruption made it easy to get rid of him before proceeding to tackle the big fish of Richard Nixon. As I say, I doubt removi...

On January 17, I noted here that the Clintons and their old retainer Dick Morris have been trying to create a Hillary wave . At the time, I noted that Morris said, “Hillary has set up a brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do,” Morris added. “Knowing the people around her, I believe there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill. How's that working out? According to Paul Bedard, In the first polling deep dive into her chances to win the 2024 Democratic presidential primary and eventual race against Trump, Clinton turned out to be no more popular than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and far less popular than Vice President Kamala Harris and former first lady Michelle Obama in a potential primary. . . . “The new hope of a revived Hillary Clinton gets beaten by Trump, 51% to 41%, with Trump beating her among independents, 52% to 37%; among suburban voters, 52% to 39%; and taking 19% among liberals, 13% among Democrats, a...

A headkine on Politico yesterday: Why Schumer picked a filibuster fight he couldn't win . Chuck Schumer doesn’t typically lead his caucus into losing votes that divide Democrats. He made an exception for election reform. The Senate majority leader has run a 50-50 Senate for a year now, longer than anyone else. The whole time, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have consistently communicated to Schumer that he wouldn’t get their votes to weaken the filibuster, no matter the underlying issue. But his decision to force the vote on the caucus anyway — and get 48 Democrats on the record for a unilateral rules change dubbed "the nuclear option" — will go down as one of Schumer’s riskiest moves as leader. Politico does all it can to spin it as a some sort of secretlly brilliant move for Schumer, but it keeps trying to answer that pesky question -- why. Schumer usually touts his caucus' unity, declining to engage in extended debates over issues that divide his 50 m...

I dipped in and out of Biden's press conference yesterday. As of this morning, there are many takes on it, but what struck me in particular was this sequence , in response to a question from (I think) Peter Doocy: Why are you trying so hard in your first year to pull the country so far to the left? THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m not. I don’t know what you consider to be too far to the left if, in fact, we’re talking about making sure that we had the money for COVID, making sure we had the money to put together the Bipartisan Infrastructure, and making sure we were able to provide for those things that, in fact, would significantly reduce the burden on the working-class people but make them — they have to continue to work hard. I don’t know how that is pointed to the left. If you may recall, I — you guys have been trying to convince me that I am Bernie Sanders. I’m not. I like him, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist. I’m a mainstream Democrat, and I have been...

Few photos from the past weekend's news illustrate more clearly the current real US political alignment. With even legacy media beginning to ask whether President Brandon needs to change direction following a disastrous first year, let's parse out the current situation. My first observation is that the current Democrat coalition is anything but Marxist, pace Mark Levin. My second is that President Brandon has no choice but to do everything he can to appease that coalition as it exists. The contradiction in the news photos of the looted container trains in Los Angeles over the weekend is the distant view of the alabaster city framed by stately palms contrasted with the third-world conditions on the rail right of way in the foreground. This is one key nexus of the current coalition, which the rail shippers fully recognize : Photos and videos showing piles of empty boxes littered alongside rail tracks in Los Angeles County, California have gone viral as shipping compani...

The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." I ran into an interesting recent case that illustrates y et again how useful it is. The state of California has agreed to remove an “Aztec chant” from its ethnic studies curriculum following a legal settlement with several plaintiffs The new curriculum would have had students praying to the Aztec dieties Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huizilopochtli and Xipe Totec. Part of the chant read “Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation, changin’ our situation in this human transformation.” The co-chair of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Tolteka Cuauhtin, had said the chants were to “regenerate indigenous spiritual traditions”...

I think we can safely say that Hillary Clinton is eyeing a run for the presidency in 2024. Dick Morris, a sometime Clinton intimate, is making the case: Morris said Sunday that if Democrats lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be toast — paving the way for a second Hillary bid, with husband Bill playing an architect to her strategy. “There’s a good chance of it,” said Morris, referring to a Hillary-Trump rematch, to John Catsimatidis on the radio host’s WABC show. “Hillary has set up a brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do,” Morris added. “Knowing the people around her, I believe there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill. . . . ​”She has set up a zero-sum game where the worse [Biden] does, the better she does, because she’s positioned herself as the Democratic alternative to Biden. Not just to Biden, but to the extreme left in the Democratic Pa...

I was looking at the conservative aggregators this morning, and most reported optimistically about Trump's Florence, AZ rally last night. The surprise was this report from The Atlantic, Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign . Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is. “I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back." . . . Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump only lost Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to ...