In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As the impact of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision bgegins to sink in, after a few days, people are starting to recognize that for good or ill, this was Donald Trump's doing. For instance, To the Never Trump people: Elections matter. . . . Because Donald J. Trump was president and because he had the courage to stick with solidly conservative jurists and because he, unlike Never Trumpers, knows how to hold the line, abortion now goes back to the people to decide. . . . And to those who sought a perfect vessel for perfect policy, remember, politics is about wielding power and creating policy to wield that power. Sitting on a perch waiting for the perfect politician to achieve policies is a fool’s errand. All politicians are flawed, some more than others, and yet, a flawed politician can achieve good outcomes with courage. Breitbart News provided a partial transcript of Trump's remarks at an Illinois rally on Saturday: We have very big news. Maybe the...

So far, opinon against the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade has been fairly predictable, centering on how Dobbs will impact poor women of color in states that limit their ability to get an abortion, since it will cost them money to travel to a state with more liberal policies. This, of course, inadvertently reveals the original purpose of Planned Parenthood, which was eugenic, aimed at increasing the rate of abortion among non-whites. The assumption, or at least the hope, of the anti- Dobbs faction is that non-whites will recognize that reducing access to abortion in even this limited way is against their interests, when African-Americans in particular have come to understand that by limiting their birthrate through state-encouraged abortion, the ruling class also limits their numbers at the ballot box. Another difficulty is that as a practical matter, the general population covered by the designation LGBTQ+ is much less affected by access to abortio...

In terms of overall deliciousness, few recent events can match the DUI arrest of Paul Pelosi, the Speaker's husband, over the Memorial Day weekend in Napa, CA. My wife and I follow it with special interest, because we frequently visit there, and when we do, we regularly pass the site. Information about the circumstances has been tightly controlled. Thanks to near-universal use of police body and dash cameras, we may assume footage exists of the arrest and Pelosi's field sobriety test, and given the popularity of TV shows that use such footage, it's not hard to imagine what it was like even if we can't see the actual episode. This is part of the deliciousness behind the whole story. But if the political establishment ever thought they'd be able to keep a lid on things, they're of course mistaken. The arrest and subsequent court proceedings are public records, and eventually everything will come out. The district attorney issued charges this past week,...

One of the "incredible transitions" President Biden has sought most consistently to impose on US society is far-reaching accommodations for transgender people, an extremely tiny part of the population not even supported by much more numerous gays and lesbians, who insist they're attracted instead to same-sex people based on their existing sexual identity and don't want any sort of makeover, surgical, hormonal, or cosmetic. Recent examples include implementing transgender-friendly airport screening procedures on the Transgender Day of Visibility last April, including unspecified "changes to scanners used for screening. . . . intended to make procedures less invasive". As far as I can tell, based on scanning images I see on media, they currently show very little flesh of any sort. but the concern appears to be that what minimal shadowy outlines the scanners now reveal could still establish that the frumpy middle-aged woman going through security is actua...

Recently published remarks by Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit editors have drawn a lot of controversy from conservatives, including conservative Catholics. I discussed his remarks about Ukraine the other day, which as a conservative Catholic I find unobjectionable. Today I want to look at the problem of what he calls in his remarks "restorationism": [T]he Council that some pastors remember best is that of Trent. What I’m saying is not nonsense. Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of “restorers” – for example, in the United States there are many – is significant. An Argentine bishop told me that he had been asked to administer a diocese that had fallen into the hands of these “restorers.” They had never accepted the Council. There are ideas, behaviors that arise from a restorationism that basically did not accept the Council. The problem is precisely this: in some contexts the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes ...

Media reaction to the situation in Kaliningrad has been slow. The best I've seen so far is from CNBC : Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, commented Tuesday that “it’s fair to say that Kaliningrad is a strategic imperative for Russia” noting that defending and sustaining it certainly is. “Russia will react for sure, the only question is what that will be ... [and] what Russia could do militarily,” he noted. “A land attack to drive a corridor through Lithuania would be a direct attack on Lithuania triggering NATO Article 5 defence. Putin knows this - that’s war with NATO. Can Putin afford that when he is struggling to deliver on even his now much-reduced strategic objectives in Ukraine? He would also have to launch an assault through Belarus, stretching his supply lines, and splitting his forces,” he noted. Ash suggested that Russia could seek to use its sizeable naval assets in the Baltic Sea to enforce some kind of tit-for-tat blockad...

Most of the aggregators missed yesterday's biggest story, but CNSNews had it: Russia Claims NATO Ally Lithuania Is Blockading Kaliningrad, Warns it Will Respond . Over the past week or so, I've begun to think the biggest outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be in the Baltics, and Kaliningrad has become the locus. According to Wikipedia , following its capture by the Red Army ihn April 1945, The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it under Soviet administration. The city was renamed to Kaliningrad [from Königsberg] in 1946 in honor of Soviet revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is governed as the administrative centre of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost oblast of Russia. As a major transport hub, with sea and river ports, the city is home to the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy, and is one of the largest industrial centres in Russia. It was deemed the best city in Russia in 2012, 2013 a...