In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The United Methodist Church is belatedly coming to the same crisis of division that most mainline Protestant denominations have already met, the question of same-sex marriage and ordaining actively and avowedly same-sex-attracted clergy, although this has never been the exclusive issue dividing any of the denominations. In recent weeks, legacy media have begun to notice, and The Week, for example, explains , United Methodists have been more-or-less civilly disagreeing about gay rights since the 1970s, but the issue came to a head in 2019. At a UMC General Conference that year, the theologically conservative camp, aided by socially conservative United Methodists from Africa, outflanked the moderates and liberals and pushed through a resolution affirming existing UMC bans on same-sex weddings and the ordination of "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" as clergy. The UMC conservatives appear to have drawn lessons from the experience of Episcopalians in particular, recognizi...

Elon Musk gave Alex Berenson, a gadfly journalist and COVID skeptic, access to Twitter's files last week . Berenson had been banned from Twitter in 2021, but he successfully sued for reinstatement in an action separate from Musk's takeover before that took place. What Musk is really offering is the chance to search Twitter’s systems seeking information about specific topics, in a process akin to discovery in civil lawsuits. Reporters ask for searches. Twitter turns over what it finds to be read or screenshotted at Twitter headquarters but retains the original documents. . . . Musk is making available an unprecedented trove of evidence about government and private efforts to suppress free speech on the most important global platform for journalism. Musk’s decision is not risk-free and has little or no appreciable benefit for him. Everyone - Democrat, Republican, or independent - should thank him for doing it. On his Substack, Berenson outlines one particular episode o...

I'm still thinking about various remarks by observers, especially David Sacks in Saturday's post , that Elon Musk and his staff at Twitter are working on ways to improve the Twitter product, although Sacks makes the point that the product "simply hasn't changed that much in the last 10 years". So my first question is what is the product? I think the answer to that one is simple, it's an online forum or community. It's also a type of social media. That's a problem in itself, because social media is generally thought to be something unhealthy, especially if used in excess. Things that make it unhealthy include the ability to be obnoxious while concealing one's identity and the ability to portray onesself in highly favorable terms -- and especially in light of the latter, social media can be depressing when people look at their own lives and worry they don't measure up to the happy lives other users represent themselves as living. On one ha...

Coverage of the vote for US Speaker of the House has been remarkably shallow. Breitbart observes , "No speaker race had lasted 15 rounds or more in 163 years, according to House records." Simple arithmetic puts the last time that happened in 1860, which Breitbart's own crack writers failed to acknolwedge. Hmm. What happened the next year? Any students know? Following the 2020 election, some commentators compared the debate over the outcome to 1876, which resulted in the Compromise of 1877, whereby Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House on the understanding that he would remove federal troops from South Carolina. This effectively ended Reconstruction, which was one of a series of events that bookended the US Civil War. My own view for a while has been that the US is approaching a need to resolve issues nearly comparable to those that caused the 1861-65 Civil War, although I don't think armed conflict will be involved. If we look at events that...

I found two items in yesterday's feed that, while there's some dissonance between them, provide additional insight into what Elon Musk dsicovered at Twitter. The first is the video above on the UK UnHerd YouTube channel, a follow-up in their developing series on Twitter that I first noted here on December 21 . It features David Sacks, a venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal with Musk. I'll discuss this video after I talk about the other data point, a piece by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge, The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays Off About 40 Data Scientists And Engineers Working On Ad Team . This simply confirms my surmise that at the time Musk decided to buy Twitter, there was simply no there there. For years Twitter had operated less like a company and more like a cult compound for leftist ideologues, with free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings and near zero productivity. Those days appear to be ov...

There's been a quasi-news story in the background for the past week that Hunter Biden has been trying to get a reduction in his child support payments to the Arkansas exotic dancer whose child he fathered. According to the New York Post, In September 2022, Biden appealed to an Independence County, Ark., court for his IOUs to be reduced, claiming “a substantial material change” in his “financial circumstances.” As the link indicates, the story has been around for some months. A story on the original filing from last summe r quotes the dancer's attorney: "Ultimately, this is going to require us to look deeply, more deeply, into Hunter's finances," Lancaster said. "I'm going to want to have a deposition with Mr. Biden. Like last time, I'm going to bring my forensic accountant to the deposition, unless the judge tells me I can't." . . . In the past, Biden had presented himself as financially strapped, telling the court in a November...

Tucker Carlson very belatedly featured the viral "My Day at Work" TikTok video by the egregiously entitled Twitter employee on his show earlier this week, with commentary from Mike Rowe. The thing nobody has pointed out, as far as I can tell, is that this video seems to have reached general notice last year on October 26, which was exactly one day before Elon Musk bought Twitter. In other words, it was almost immediately overtaken by events, and by December, a visitor to the same Twitter headquarters shown in the video characterized that headquarters as looking like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned . In fact, the story as of Tuesday was : Twitter’s landlord, the Columbia Property Trust, is suing the company for neglecting to pay rent for its downtown San Francisco headquarters. The company’s new owner, Elon Musk, has reportedly been attempting to renegotiate the terms of the lease, as the company frantically tries to cut costs. As I've said, Twitt...