In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, we all got an emergency alert on our cell phones: "City of LA: COVID cases are spiking. Get vaccinated/tested now." My immediate thought was to ask if I'd missed something -- as far as I knew, cases in the county had been slowly declining for months. I went to my computer and pulled up the graph above. Yup, same old same old. Somebody at emergency management decided maybe they could panic half a dozen people into getting the shot that way, huh? This is a completely irresponsible way of abusing the emergency alert system, which should be used only to notify people of wildfires, flash floods, and the like. If you cry wolf once too often, people don't take you seriouly. So over the holiday and yesterday, the big headline at all the aggregators was WORST EVER MUTATION! VACCINE RESISTANT! STOCK MAKET DRIOPS 1000 POINTS! This is panic porn pure and simple, and I guess the world was ready for it if LA City was broadcasting stale ale...

The other day, I ran into a piece by David French on Jonah Goldberg's Dispatch newsletter, " The Moral Collapse of America's Largest Christian University ". Up to now, I haven't given David French much thought. All I knew about him was that, as a writer for National Review, he briefly mulled running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, making him a never-Trumper. Poking around the web, I saw that he's now, like David Brooks, a contribuing writer for The Atlantic, as well as Senior Editor for Goldberg's Dispatch and a columnist for Time. Yet Wikipedia says of him , David Austin French (born January 24, 1969) is an American political commentator, theologically conservative traditional Christian, and former attorney who has argued high profile religious liberty cases. The "theologically conservative traditional Christian" part puzzles me. Here's what he has to say about "Christians" in the Dispatch st...

President Biden channeled Marie Antoinette yesterday: "For the hundreds of thousands of folks who bought one of those electric cars, they’re going to save $800 to $1000 in fuel costs this year,” Biden said, referring to the $112,595 electric Hummer pickup he test drove at a General Motors factory in Detroit earlier this month. The least expensive new electric car is the 2022 Nissan Leaf, with a starting price of $28,375. You can get a used Leaf cheaper, but they're still more expensive than comparable gas-driven cars. But not many people currently suffering from high gas prices will come out better, since trading in a gas-driven car will bring a new, higher car payment no matter what. Another issue is vehicle range. Available models start at about 100 miles, which for many commutes is a single round trip. Recharging can take from 30 minutes to 12 hours, so you can't just swing by the corner gas station to fill up. Longer trips other than commutes are problematic...

As an Aristotelian, I look for causes. We don't have a whole lot of insight for now into the "final" cause of Darrell Brooks Jr's crashing a very snazzy red Ford Escape into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade on November 21. It sounds as though he may have been fleeing another crime scene, or a fight, and it's hard not to speculate that drugs may also have been involved. But that's less important for now than the "efficient" cause, for which we have some informed insight. Brooks is the entirely predictable product of a political- and social-media driven effort to address crime by pretending that it doesn’t exist. To present criminals — particularly black criminals — as victims. To pay no meaningful attention to actual victims — who overwhelmingly are black themselves. . . . Brooks, however, is a depressingly familiar type. He had been released on nominal bail Friday after being charged Nov. 5 with domestic abuse, resisting an officer, s...

I was doing some research into the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and ran into this passage at Britannica : Because of the hopes aroused in 1918–19, the fact that no far-reaching plan for securing public control over industry or for breaking up the big landed estates was carried through had two consequences. First, although the German working class undoubtedly improved its political and economic status under the republic, a considerable portion of it was embittered by the failure to effect drastic reform of the social and economic systems. This disenchantment was to provide the left-wing opposition with strong working-class support, which weakened both the Social Democratic Party and the republic. This brought to mind Whittaker Chambers's observation that as of the 1920s, German was in fact the language of international socialism, and Germany was the locus of the movement. My takeaway from the link above is that the German working class at the time had clearly articulat...

Last week I ran into a 2018 paper by the Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction as a Pure Bourgeois Revolution , in which I found a stimulating perspective on the current political situation, which I think represents a counterrevolution by the elites allied with the Lumpenproletariat , white climate activists, and pansexualists, against "Trumpism" a populist alliance of the working and middle classes that is in fact multiracial. (These are precisely the people David Brooks sneers at, though he also finds them "terrifying".) Guelzo's paper has also appeared on YouTube as "Reconstruction: The Last Bourgeois Revolution": After last year's election, my attention was drawn to the US presidential election of 1876, that was disputed and resolved by an electoral commission that produced the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to the Republican Rutherford Hayes while effectively ending Reconstruction by withdrawing Union troops from ...

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...