In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 ...