In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In the Washington Examiner yesterday : Also distressing to hear were Hutchinson’s accounts of Trump’s repeated fits of rage, including dining table contents overturned and ketchup dishes thrown violently across the room. The worst by far, though, was that people immediately returning from being with Trump in the presidential vehicle told of the president trying to grab the wheel of the car to force it to be driven to the Capitol and then violently reaching for the neck of Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, who headed the president’s protective detail. Hutchinson’s testimony confirmed a damning portrayal of Trump as unstable, unmoored, and absolutely heedless of his sworn duty to effectuate a peaceful transition of presidential power. Considering the entirety of her testimony, it is unsurprising that Hutchinson said she heard serious discussions of Cabinet members invoking the 25th Amendment that would have at least temporarily evicted Trump from office. Trump is a disgrace. Republi...

I mentioned Raymond Chandler in yesterday's post. and for whatever reason, I kept thinking about him all day. Then, late in the afternoon, the news broke that at minimum, it was physically impossible for Trump to have grabbed the steering wheel of the SUV (or whatever it was) in which he was riding on January 6, and by this morning, the headlines emerged that the Secret Service was prepared to testify under oath that Trump never assaulted the driver or the other agent as former aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee. Then I realized that a stock figure in Hollywood noir from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown is the pretty woman who tells lies. This is part of the secret deliciousness of the genre; women are portrayed as dishonest schemers, and it takes a disreputable but world-weary detective to penetrate the conventional wisdom and winkle out the truth, though the woman's attractiveness remains. Look at Sam Spade's final confrontation with Brig...

I've been building a detailed history file on the First Crackhead now that reporters like Andrew Kerr have been able to dig deeper into previously password-protected files on his abandoned laptop. But even before Kerr's revelations, I find that I missed this story in the New York Post from last April: Hunter Biden — who’s admitted battling addictions to booze and crack cocaine for much of his life — is living across the street from a swank rehab center where Lindsay Lohan once spent a summer drying out, The Post has learned. The scandal-scarred first son’s $20,000-a-month rental home in Southern California is located just steps from the Cliffside Malibu, one of four “residential homes” run by its namesake parent company. The price for “luxury,” in-patient treatment there isn’t advertised, but reportedly ran $68,000 for a 30-day stay nearly a decade ago. The map at the top of this post comes from that story (click on the image for a larger view). I first mentioned his Mal...

As the impact of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision bgegins to sink in, after a few days, people are starting to recognize that for good or ill, this was Donald Trump's doing. For instance, To the Never Trump people: Elections matter. . . . Because Donald J. Trump was president and because he had the courage to stick with solidly conservative jurists and because he, unlike Never Trumpers, knows how to hold the line, abortion now goes back to the people to decide. . . . And to those who sought a perfect vessel for perfect policy, remember, politics is about wielding power and creating policy to wield that power. Sitting on a perch waiting for the perfect politician to achieve policies is a fool’s errand. All politicians are flawed, some more than others, and yet, a flawed politician can achieve good outcomes with courage. Breitbart News provided a partial transcript of Trump's remarks at an Illinois rally on Saturday: We have very big news. Maybe the...

So far, opinon against the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade has been fairly predictable, centering on how Dobbs will impact poor women of color in states that limit their ability to get an abortion, since it will cost them money to travel to a state with more liberal policies. This, of course, inadvertently reveals the original purpose of Planned Parenthood, which was eugenic, aimed at increasing the rate of abortion among non-whites. The assumption, or at least the hope, of the anti- Dobbs faction is that non-whites will recognize that reducing access to abortion in even this limited way is against their interests, when African-Americans in particular have come to understand that by limiting their birthrate through state-encouraged abortion, the ruling class also limits their numbers at the ballot box. Another difficulty is that as a practical matter, the general population covered by the designation LGBTQ+ is much less affected by access to abortio...

In terms of overall deliciousness, few recent events can match the DUI arrest of Paul Pelosi, the Speaker's husband, over the Memorial Day weekend in Napa, CA. My wife and I follow it with special interest, because we frequently visit there, and when we do, we regularly pass the site. Information about the circumstances has been tightly controlled. Thanks to near-universal use of police body and dash cameras, we may assume footage exists of the arrest and Pelosi's field sobriety test, and given the popularity of TV shows that use such footage, it's not hard to imagine what it was like even if we can't see the actual episode. This is part of the deliciousness behind the whole story. But if the political establishment ever thought they'd be able to keep a lid on things, they're of course mistaken. The arrest and subsequent court proceedings are public records, and eventually everything will come out. The district attorney issued charges this past week,...

One of the "incredible transitions" President Biden has sought most consistently to impose on US society is far-reaching accommodations for transgender people, an extremely tiny part of the population not even supported by much more numerous gays and lesbians, who insist they're attracted instead to same-sex people based on their existing sexual identity and don't want any sort of makeover, surgical, hormonal, or cosmetic. Recent examples include implementing transgender-friendly airport screening procedures on the Transgender Day of Visibility last April, including unspecified "changes to scanners used for screening. . . . intended to make procedures less invasive". As far as I can tell, based on scanning images I see on media, they currently show very little flesh of any sort. but the concern appears to be that what minimal shadowy outlines the scanners now reveal could still establish that the frumpy middle-aged woman going through security is actua...

Recently published remarks by Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit editors have drawn a lot of controversy from conservatives, including conservative Catholics. I discussed his remarks about Ukraine the other day, which as a conservative Catholic I find unobjectionable. Today I want to look at the problem of what he calls in his remarks "restorationism": [T]he Council that some pastors remember best is that of Trent. What I’m saying is not nonsense. Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of “restorers” – for example, in the United States there are many – is significant. An Argentine bishop told me that he had been asked to administer a diocese that had fallen into the hands of these “restorers.” They had never accepted the Council. There are ideas, behaviors that arise from a restorationism that basically did not accept the Council. The problem is precisely this: in some contexts the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes ...

Media reaction to the situation in Kaliningrad has been slow. The best I've seen so far is from CNBC : Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, commented Tuesday that “it’s fair to say that Kaliningrad is a strategic imperative for Russia” noting that defending and sustaining it certainly is. “Russia will react for sure, the only question is what that will be ... [and] what Russia could do militarily,” he noted. “A land attack to drive a corridor through Lithuania would be a direct attack on Lithuania triggering NATO Article 5 defence. Putin knows this - that’s war with NATO. Can Putin afford that when he is struggling to deliver on even his now much-reduced strategic objectives in Ukraine? He would also have to launch an assault through Belarus, stretching his supply lines, and splitting his forces,” he noted. Ash suggested that Russia could seek to use its sizeable naval assets in the Baltic Sea to enforce some kind of tit-for-tat blockad...

Most of the aggregators missed yesterday's biggest story, but CNSNews had it: Russia Claims NATO Ally Lithuania Is Blockading Kaliningrad, Warns it Will Respond . Over the past week or so, I've begun to think the biggest outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be in the Baltics, and Kaliningrad has become the locus. According to Wikipedia , following its capture by the Red Army ihn April 1945, The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it under Soviet administration. The city was renamed to Kaliningrad [from Königsberg] in 1946 in honor of Soviet revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is governed as the administrative centre of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost oblast of Russia. As a major transport hub, with sea and river ports, the city is home to the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy, and is one of the largest industrial centres in Russia. It was deemed the best city in Russia in 2012, 2013 a...

There's been a certain amount of commentary -- at minimum, somewhat bewildered -- about Pope Francis's recent remarks on Ukraine. The full text of a wider-ranging exchange in which he made them is here . I think they should also be taken in the context of official remarks by Cardinal Parolin , the Vatican Secretary of State: Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, has reiterated that Ukraine has a “legitimate” right to defend itself from Russian aggression, but he also has warned that weapons being sent there by other countries could lead to a “terrible” escalation of the war. “Ukraine is resisting Russia based on this principle,” Parolin said in a recent exclusive interview with CNA, referring to the right of self defense. They should also be seen in the context of CCC 2309 : - the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; - all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown...

I ask this because a new figure (at least, new to me) has been making the talking head rounds, Andrew Kerr, an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner. Kerr is currently best known for revealing a Dec. 3, 2018 recording, previously undiscovered on the laptop Hunter abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, in which Hunter rambles at length on the theme, "Yeah, my father will take any policy positions that I want him to adopt." In at least one interview, though, Kerr suggests this isn't the only one of Hunter's laptops that's gone astray. I haven't been able to find any hard-copy piece by Kerr on the subject, but I did finally run into another piece from last summer here : In an explicit video obtained by the Daily Mail, Hunter Biden told a sex worker back in 2019 that allegedly, Russian drug dealers had stolen his laptop that may have contained "sensitive information" after they partied with him in Las Vegas back in 2018. The video ...

I'm back to my theories on what's actually going on in President Brandon's brain. As I've been saying for some time, I don't think it's senility or dementia; his thinking strikes me as purpose-driven, however obscure that purpose may be. Among the recent headlines saying he's surpassed modern records for presidential vacation days, I see most recently that the Brandons are returning to the beach this weekend: For the second time this month, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will be spending the weekend at their North Shores beach home. The couple was in town the first weekend of June to celebrate Jill’s birthday, which was June 3, and this weekend is Father’s Day. According to the White House’s Daily Guidance and Press Schedule issued June 16, the presidential couple are leaving Washington, D.C., at 11 a.m., Friday, June 17, and are expected to arrive in the Rehoboth area by 11:55 a.m. The guidance doesn’t say when the Bidens will be ...

What intrigues me about the Russia-Ukraine War is how it's first sent me to look at early modern history in Poland, the Baltic region, and Ukraine. But the map above is from Wikipedia and shows the Swedish Empire at its greatest extent about 1720, when the rise of Russia changed alignments. Here's the Wikipedia summary : The Swedish Empire was a European great power that exercised territorial control over much of the Baltic region during the 17th and early 18th centuries (Swedish: Stormaktstiden, "the Era of Great Power"). The beginning of the empire is usually taken as the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, who ascended the throne in 1611, and its end as the loss of territories in 1721 following the Great Northern War. . . . After the victories in the Thirty Years' War, Sweden reached the climax of the great-power era during the Second Northern War, when its primary adversary, Denmark–Norway, was neutralized by the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 (this is when the Swedis...