In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There's been a lot of commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina cases. Just last Tuesday, I posted on the question of legacies , admissions policies that privilege offspring of alumni, in the makeup of Ivy League student bodies and their consequent impact on the US upper class. This is something of a mirror-image view of the affirmative action problem the court addressed, and it was discussed to some extent in the reporting. According to the New York Post , At Harvard, applicants are initially scrutinized by a “first reader,” who gives the prospective student a numerical score in six categories: academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support, personal, and “overall”, taking race into account for the final number. But the final decision doesn't really reflect all those criteria: During a final winnowing process, four factors a...

People have been commenting on the photos of Hunter boarding Marine One on the way to Camp David with his dad or at the state dinner with Prime Minister Moti, which are taken as a tacit signal that Hunter has been fully rehabilitated following his guilty pleas to various misdemeanors and settlemenmt of his child support case with Lunden Roberts. The question I have, though, is if this is meant to show that things are back to normal with the First Crackhead, where are the First Crackhead's wife and three-year-old son? They were notably absent from the past week's events, as far as I can tell. The most recent sighting I've beem able to find is in the UK Daily Mail from May 11 , where they were in LA together: The president's son had his little boy in his arms and his wife Melissa Cohen trailing close behind as he left the children's playground and got into a black Suburban under the supervision of security personnel. But every indication has been that Hun...

There's been a small stir this week over a new Gallup poll that says church attendance in the United States is lower than it was before the COVID lockdowns . On one hand, this shouldn't be a surprise, as stories have already covered this without the need for Gallup to ask about it again. A Pew Research poll just this past March reported: There are some indications that in-person engagement in religious services has declined slightly since 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33% to 30%) over that span, and one-in-five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic. The Gallup results aren't much different, so I'm not sure why anyone bothered. Per the first link, In the Gallup survey, 31 percent of respondents said they have attended church, synagogue, mosque or temp...

At the end of yesterday's post, I said I was still mulling over the question of how the latest crop of famous white-collar crooks had suddenly sprung from the authentic American upper class, or at minimum the prestigious gentry represented by Ivy League faculty, when their earlier equivalents like Ivan Boesky. Jeffrey Epstein, and Bernard Madoff had been middle-class Jews or other ethnics who'd gone to public school and often hadn't finished college. I'm nowhere near done with that task, but I think I've found three directions from which to approach the problem, outlined in the title here: bobos in paradise, impostor syndrome, and affinity fraud. The first refers to David Brooks's ploddingly obtuse 2000 book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There . Its thesis in brief is that the Ivy League and other top-level universities were traditionally bastions of wealth and privilege, but after World War II, for reasons Brooks never quite ex...

One thing I began to notice about this decade's crop of highly publicized corporate fiascos and white-collar crooks is how many people come from the upper echelons of society. Stockton Rush, late CEO of OceanGate, was descended from two signers of the US Declaration of Independence and has degrees from Princeton and Harvard Business School. Alissa Heinerscheid, one of two Bud Light executives put on leave after the Dylan Mulvaney debacle, comes from a wealthy Houston family, went to the upper-crust Groton prep school, and has degrees from Harvard and Wharton. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, went to the elite Crystal Springs Uplands private school and then MIT; his parents are Stanford professors. His FTX colleague Caroline Ellison went to Stanford; her parents are MIT professors. Elizabeth Holmes, who went to prison for the Theranos fraud this past May, is descended from the Fleischmann Yeast fortune, went to the private St John's School in Houston and then to Stanford, ...

John Sexton at Hot Air didn't even bother to put up a new post. He just edited the title of the same one I linked yesterday, The rebellion in Russia is really happening (Update: It's over) . The outcome of all yesterday's excitement turned out to be a hybrid of Valkyrie Lite and the Whiskey Rebellion -- the feckless coup attempt by the Stauffenberg plotters was put down within hours by Hitler on July 20, 1944, but it was followed by ruthless executions of thousands. In contrast, George Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 on terms a lot like Putin's: Washington himself rode at the head of an army to suppress the insurgency, with 13,000 militiamen provided by the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The rebels all went home before the arrival of the army, and there was no confrontation. About 20 men were arrested, but all were later acquitted or pardoned. The bottom line for Hitler, Putin, and Washington was that the variou...

It looks like we have news that overshadows both new Hunter e-mails and the imploded Titanic sub, so of couse, these are the headlines at the conservative Rantingly aggregator as I write this (click on the image for a larger version): The big thing that's impressed me over the past few months has been how easily Conservative Inc has segued from spring break into Memorial Day into Juneteenth and is now heading into an early Fourth of July. And Labor Day isn't that far off! John Sexton at Hot Air covers it thus : Normally I don’t work this late but there are potentially world-changing events happening tonight. . . . I’m running out of steam so I’m going to call it a night. I’ll probably update this some more in the morning. Putin is comparing events to the Whites vs Reds in the 1918 civil war, but ol' John Sexton doesn't like working late. It's all about him as he desultorily skims over history. And it's now morning, but it looks like he's so pooped ...

There's something evocative about the story of the Titanic sub. It probably owes a lot to the Titanic myth itself, which is reflected in the title of the book Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster by Steven Biel (1997), which according to this review , ". . . seared itself into American memory not because it was timeless but because it was timely". . . . Groups on all sides of the volatile issues of gender, class, religion, and race all found in the Titanic lessons and judgements to bolster their causes. The much smaller Titanic sub disaster is having the same effect. Biel's title, by the way, is taken from a 1938 country song by the Dixon Brothers: The lyrics conclude, Your Titanic sails today, on Life's Sea you're far away For Jesus Christ can take you safely through Just obey his great command, over there you'll safely land You'll never go down with that old canoe Sailing out out to win her f...

What's held my attention most in the story of the missing Titanic sub is the subplot involving wealth -- and it sounds like much of it is either inherited or of unidentifiable origin -- and a strange subcluture where a clique of wealthy people feed their own deep insecurities. Let's just start with the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush. According to this story, In past media appearances, Rush appears calm, collegiate and telegenic. With silver hair and business-casual attire, he looks like he might be more at home on the golf course than thousands of feet under the sea. However, questions are now swirling about some of his decisions related to the submersible. . . . Rush has described himself as having been "born into" wealth and then "grew it," according to a 2017 Bloomberg profile. The grandson of an oil and gas magnate, he became a private investor alongside working in aviation, earning his pilot's license at the age of 19, the outlet reported...

As I look at this morning's news, I'm beginnoing to think Austrian Col Markus Reisner buried the main insight in the presentation I linked yesterday. I quoted him there : The West will only support Ukraine as long as the West believes it is important to support the war against Russia, and the West believes the Ukrainian forces are winning. For now, the second part of his statement is key, and it sounds as if President Zelensky is acutely aware of the problem, especially since Ukraine's winter counteroffensive didn't happen at all, and the spring counteroffensive, which Zelensky announced only on June 8, has apparently now been paused after only a week. But even as of June 8, the day Zelensky announced the start of the counteroffensive, Forbes reported problems : A Russian artillery strike on a Ukrainian vehicle column during a daytime assault on or around the town of Novopokrovka—35 miles southeast of Zaporizhzhia city in southern Ukraine—apparently knocke...

As of June 11, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to have confirmed that his country's long-awaited counter-offensive against Russia has started. "Counter-offensive and defensive actions are taking place," he said. But he added that he would not talk in detail about which stage or state the counter-offensive was in. The comments come after an escalation of fighting in the south and east of Ukraine and speculation about progress of the widely anticipated push. But as oif June 18, only a week after that announcement, The Institute for the Study of War reported , Ukrainian forces may be temporarily pausing counteroffensive operations to reevaluate their tactics for future operations. Head of the Estonian Defense Forces Intelligence Center Colonel Margo Grosberg stated on June 16 that he assesses "we won't see an offensive over the next seven days.” The Wall Street Journal similarly reported on June 17 that Ukrainian forces “h...

Axios ran as piece over the weekend that supports my view of Biden's Friday "God save the queen" remark that I ran on Saturday: Biden’s quirky aphorisms are sometimes weaponized by Republicans to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline. But Biden has been using unique phrases for years — but even some of his aides aren't exactly sure what he means by them. . . . Biden also said, “God save the queen,” when he was vice president in January 2017, after he certified Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, The Telegraph reported at the time. The story noted that they'd asked several Biden aides what he meant by the phrase, but none could give a clear answer. But it went on, During this year's State of the Union, he told Republican lawmakers, “Lots of luck in your senior year.” Some Biden allies believe that's his way of saying, "Good luck with that." But at the time, the White House declined to tell The New Y...

The headlines at the right-wing aggregators were misleading: Dodgers Wind Up With About 60 People Attending The Game For Their Anti-Catholic Stunt . What actually happened was that the Dodgers, caught between a rock and a hard place, split the difference and gave the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence their community hero award at a ceremony on the field but considerably before the actual game. (Most of the aggregators, including Breitbart at the link, eventually clarified this.) The 60 people who were there were just a select group watching the little pre-game ceremony. Nevertheless, a few booed loudly. So the Dodgers' strategy was to finesse the "sisters" without re-un-disinviting them, without an apology or even a direct acknowledgement of the problem, and hope it all blows over. This has mirrored the corporate strategies of Bud Light and Target, as well to a lesser extent other companies like Kohls and Starbucks, which have quietly removed Pride Month signage and...