In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A recent episode of the TV series The Food That Built America covered the rise of the upscale Starbucks brand, in contrast to the middle- and working-class Dunkin' Doughnuts. Howard Schultz, a marketing innovator, was inspired by the atmosphere of Italian coffee shops while he was traveling there and saw an opportunity: the episode didn't put it this way, but in effect, he could create a food experience that would remind his target demographic of their junior year abroad. Through an indirect path, he took over a small boutique gourmet coffee retailer based in San Francisco and Seattle and turned it into a national brand that fed the narcissism of college-educated gentry and convinced them to pay extravagant prices for cups of coffee by giving everything fancy-schmancy names. But the show left out the rest of the story: the gentry has found itself in a precarious situation. Having once retired rich on the basis of one formula, he returned to find that formula was no longer w...

Amid all the hubbub over the Nashville shooter and the Trans Day of Vengeance, I'm wondering if I'm the only person who recognized that the instructions for those planning to avenge things include "Assemble at SCOTUS -- Wear a Mask -- Bring a Buddy". While there are several variations on this basic sign, and not all contain the "Wear a Mask" instruction, that at least one variation would say this is telling. "Wear a Mask" is so 2022. What message are they trying to send? I'm sure there will be well-publicized scenes from the demonstration, and we'll just have to wait and see how many people actually turn up in masks. But during the COVID panic, not a few observers noted that ordinary cloth or paper masks had no efficacy in limiting the spread of an airborne virus, Dr Fauci famously reversed his own position on masking, and the refusal of airlines and key transit agencies to continue mask enforcement by the middle of last year marked th...

Yesterday I brought up my struggle as I approached adulthood with the idea of "natural law", which I said, having been raised Protestant, was new to me around the time I went to college. I instinctively associated it with Catholic thought, and at least in a way, I was correct. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , If any moral theory is a theory of natural law, it is Aquinas’s. . . . For Aquinas, there are two key features of the natural law . . . . The first is that, when we focus on God’s role as the giver of the natural law, the natural law is just one aspect of divine providence; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective just one part among others of the theory of divine providence. The second is that, when we focus on the human’s role as recipient of the natural law, the natural law constitutes the principles of practical rationality, those principles by which human action is to be judged as reasonable or unreasonable; and so the theo...

More than a dozen years ago, my doctor told me I needed to start monitoring my blood sugar and changing my diet to keep things within limits. So I did, and my readings stayed within normal parameters for some time, or they did until the COVID lockdowns, masking, and social distancing. Once I was allowed to go back to the doctor -- remember, this activity was proscribed as well -- he began to worry, my numbers were climbing to the point that something might need to be done. But my diet hadn't changed at all, although given the lockdowns and everything, I wasn't getting as much exercise. In any case, for nearly three years after 2020, my blood sugar readings were wildly erratic, and the doctor was getting more and more worried, although my diet hadn't changed, other than a few foods becoming unavailable due to the pandemic-related supply chain crisis. Then all of a sudden, the pandemic went away, or more precisely, everyone was catching COVID in spite of everyone havin...

It looks like the story of multiple FBI informants within the Proud Boys isn't going away. The New York Times interviewed Agent CHS-SA, Jennilyn Salinas AKA "Jen Loh", on Friday -- this version seems to be the same as the Times story , which is behind a paywall. However, I'm posting excerpts out of order. The first is nearly at the end of the story: Ms. Loh said that she began working with the F.B.I.’s office in San Antonio, Texas in 2018 or 2019 after falling victim to an attack from what she described as activists from the leftist movement antifa. At first, she said, she gave the bureau what she believed was “useful information” on leftist protesters. Soon, however, she began getting paid for her work. At that point, Ms. Loh, who once served as a top official in an organization called Latinos for Trump, started providing information to the F.B.I. on “any type of domestic terrorism — on the right or the left,” she said. So OK, as far back as five years a...

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit quotes a James Taranto piece at the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall: In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. [Gov Brian] Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.” The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20. That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows: “Look, t...

Whatever else they may be, Trump supporters aren't dumb, and in some cases, they're quite a bit smarter than Trump himself. I noted in Thursday's post that hardly anyone believed the characters shown in a viral video from the "protest" at the Manhattan courthouse were actual Trump supporters, certainly in large part because actual Trump supporters knew well enough to stay home. But that leaves aside the fact that the stars of the vignette looked like, one, an Antifa, and two, a Jacob Chansley wannabe, neither of whom struck anyone as a solid-citizen Republican type. It turns out the skeptics were right : During Tuesday’s protest in support of President Trump against his impending arrest by the radical Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Antifa members disguised as Trump supporters had apparently already infiltrated the demonstration. Independent reporter Rebecca Brannon uncovered these fake “Trump supporters” in Manhattan, who appeared to stand out like ...

The photo above is of a real Stasi informant taken from German press stories, but she may as well have been sent by Central Casting, so I'll use her for this post. Yesterday I linked to a story about the Proud Boys trial, in which on Wednesday the prosecution revealed at the last minute that a witness (so far unidentified) whom the defense planned to call as part of its case was an FBI informant. Yet again, this brought the trial to a screeching halt when the defense moved for a mistrial, and Judge Kelly scheduled a hearing for yesterday afternoon. I followed the story with great interest yesterday, but although the hearing yesterday afternoon was public, there's been little reporting. The best story I could find was this one: As revelations that a defense witness was also an FBI informant roil the already contentious Capitol riot trial of members of the far-right Proud Boys group, prosecutors said Thursday that the informant was never told to gather information abou...

The scene above is a screen shot from a video that's been going atound the web -- you can see more of it at this post on YouTube . It was taken at a protest in New York earlier this week, ostensibly to support Donald Trump as the district attorney there cogitates indicting and arresting him. However, Republicans were nearly unanimous in urging supporters to stay home, and there seems to have been a general recognition that over half those in attendance at such a rally would be informants, provocateurs, or dupes. This appears to have been the main lesson of January 6 for Trump supporters, and it looks like it was well learned. Anthony Brian Logan, the YouTube commentator at the link, thinks the QAnon Shaman clone on the right was certainly a provocateur, but his interlocutor on the left was quite possibly one as well. I certainly don't think Mr Logan is crazy to speculate about that. The QAnon Shaman clone is copying Jacob Chansley's January 6 outfit so closely -- just wi...

In this morning's headlines at The Hill: DeSantis sees lowest level of support since December in new poll, trails Trump by 28 points : Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) received just 26 percent support in the latest GOP presidential poll from Morning Consult — the lowest number he’s hit in the survey since December. DeSantis, who has not entered the GOP primary but is expected to do so, trailed former President Trump, who won 54 percent, by 28 percentage points in the new poll published on Tuesday. It's worth pointing out that predsidential polls this far out from an election year are meaningless. A quick web search brings this from NBC News in June 2015 : A brand-new national NBC/WSJ poll finds Jeb Bush leading the crowded Republican presidential field, with 22% of GOP primary voters saying he’s their first choice. He’s followed by Scott Walker at 17%, Marco Rubio at 14%, and Ben Carson at 11%. While Jeb had a similar five-point lead in our April NBC/WSJ poll, you see hi...

At pto-Trump Breitbart News: Donald Trump Jr. and Others Blast DeSantis Response to Looming Donald Trump Arrest: ‘Pure Weakness’ . At never-Trump Red State: Trump Keeps His Eye on the Ball, Rants About Ron DeSantis by Insinuating He's Gay .' At least for trhe short term, the beneficiary of the arrested-on-Tuesday kerfuffle will be Trump, simply because he'll be the focus of the news cycle whether he's arrested or not. The best point I've seen has been that the arrested-on-Tuesday issue is Trump's creation, since he made the announcement, and for that matter, his gift has always been finding ways to get free coverage from the media. And if there have been complaints that the possibility of a Trump arrest or indictment stole news coverage from the latest Hunter Biden payments, that's still Trump's doing, right? This piece at Hot Air suggests there's only upside for Trump. Until the actual order (if it exists) is signed, Alvin Bragg still...

As I continue to follow the revelations about the Biden family business ventures, I keep getting the impression that we're learning less about payoffs or influence peddling and more about Joe's character. For instance, as of Friday, he went so far as to say about the current revelations of Hunter's 2017 payments to James, Hallie, and another generic Biden, "That's not true" . On Thursday, GOP lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee revealed that they had obtained bank documents showing that Hunter Biden, the president's brother Jim, and Hallie Biden, the widow of his son Beau, received payments from Hunter's business associate Rob Walker and their joint venture with Chinese energy firm CEFC. A spokesperson for Hunter Biden's legal team confirmed the payments Thursday but emphasized that the recipients' accounts "belonged to Hunter, his uncle and Hallie – nobody else." However, Biden denied that the payments were made...