In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

My wife and I throughout our marriage gave up wine for Lent, at least up until 2020, when along with a considerable slice of the world population, we found that wine was essential therapy for lockdowns, social distancing, masks, and the rest of the COVID madness. The other day we raised the question of whether we were ready to go back to giving it up for Lent this year and almost instantly decided no way. 2022 looks like not the beginning of the end, but at least maybe the end of the beginning. What we're seeing is widely divergent policies worldwide on how to end the crisis, especially in the face of a general acknowledgement by all but the usual suspects that lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and even vaccine mandates have been either ineffective or counterproductive in combating the pandemic. An essay by Michael Bang Petersen , an adviser to the Danish government in its decision to end all COVID restrictions, makes an important point: Our research has shown that publ...

There's been a looming problem for Penn, Lia Thomas, and the Ivy League throughout the bizarre trans swimmer saga -- the NCAA, which represents many schools that, unlike the Ivies, rely heavily on their athletic programs for both serious ticket income and alumni donations, isn't quite ready to open women's sports to male competitors on the same basis as the Ivies. Last month, it tried to duck the controversy by changing its policy and deferring decisions on trans competitors to the individual sports' oversight bodies . The NCAA Board of Governors on Wednesday [January 19] voted in support of a sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation that preserves opportunity for transgender student-athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion and safety for all who compete. The new policy, effective immediately, aligns transgender student-athlete participation for college sports with recent policy changes from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and ...

Due to the talk radio format he used, you often had to get lucky and hear him on the right hour and the right day to catch his most cogent thinking. (I think as well that he reached his peak eight or ten years ago.) But one set of remarks among several has stuck with me. I believe it was during the 2012 Sandra Fluke controversy , when he railed against contraceptive mandates which included statements labeling Georgetown University Law Center student Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and "prostitute". Limbaugh was commenting on Fluke's speech the previous week to House Democrats in support of mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives. Despite disapproval from major political figures, Limbaugh made numerous similar statements over the next two days, which led to the loss of several of his national sponsors and Limbaugh apologizing on his show for some of his comments. Limbaugh recovered from this setback and then some, as he did throughout his career. Remark...

Every time I see Ukraine news, I have to force myself to remember that we had one presidential impeachment over a Ukraine phone call and another instance where Joe Biden bragged about his influence there . During Joe's vice presidency, his son Hunter served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. And throughout this period, Russia has had annexation of parts or all of Ukraine on its agenda, which also affects US policy. But I find very little anywhnere tht tries to parse this out, especially Hunter's role, since e-mails from the Hunter laptop strongly suggest that Hunter's and Joe's financial interests are closely intertwined. Here's the most complete account of Hunter's Ukraine career I can find and its connection to Joe's political influence as vice president: Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent quali...

Over the weekend, my wife and I watched a TV special on the Hart family murders , in which a lesbian couple drove an SUV with themselves and six adopted children off a northern California coastal cliff to their deaths in 2018. As more information emerged, it became clear that the couple, who had adopted the children in two groups of siblings in Texas, had received funding -- as much as 50% of their family income -- from the State of Texas for doing this, but had systematically starved, abused, and neglected the children over a period of years but had managed to evade successive complaints about the abuse to child welfare authorities in multiple states. My wife immediately remarked that there was something eerily reminiscent of the Penn trans swimmer story here. Somehow a group of the less powerful, though part of a "family" were being callously sacrificed to a larger narrative that the more powerful wished to enforce at whatever cost. In fact, the women seem to have mo...

I keep returning to David Brooks and his thesis in Bobos in Paradise that James B Conant's educational reforms, in particular egalitarian merit-based college admissions policies based on standardized testing, created a new, meritocratic elite made up especially of suburban Jews. Other writers like Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's The Chosen have sharply challenged this view, arguing that Jewish quotas in particular persist in the Ivy League, and in any case, secretive college admissions policies allow wealthy donors, legacies, influential politicians, and others to bypass putative rules. My guess is that the 2019 USC admissions scandal, whereby celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman pled guilty to paying as much as $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into USC, is just the tip of the iceberg. But USC is not an Ivy; it's second-tier, so the actual cash value of an acceptance letter from Stanford, Chicago, or an Ivy can only be estima...

Somewhere in his book The Strangest Way, a Catholic apologetic he wrote while a professor at the Mundelein seminary, Bp Barron notes a remark by Norman Mailer about Richard Nixon, that Nixon always seemed to have a little Nixon on his shoulder whispering in the big Nixon's ear telling him how to behave, advice like, "Now look sympathetic"; "Now smile." Bp Barron said no matter how you feel about Nixon, this was a good illustration of the divided self: there's no room for authenticity; you've always got to be gauging how you're coming off to other people. (I've kept looking for this in my copy but so far have been unable to find the specific reference. If anyone knows where it is, I'll be delighted to update the post here.) But this brings out other associations for me. Mailer covered Nixon in at least two books, Miami & The Siege of Chicago and St. George and the Godfather , which were about the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns. ...