In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I mentioned briefly in yesterday's post the contradiction that emerged in the US Left after the first phase of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The general abolitionist argument dating from the 18th century was that Africans are fully human and can't, unlike animals, be treated as property. Lincoln's very similar arguments against slavery were always natural-law arguments concerning human rights : That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn ...

A recent episode of the TV series The Food That Built America covered the rise of the upscale Starbucks brand, in contrast to the middle- and working-class Dunkin' Doughnuts. Howard Schultz, a marketing innovator, was inspired by the atmosphere of Italian coffee shops while he was traveling there and saw an opportunity: the episode didn't put it this way, but in effect, he could create a food experience that would remind his target demographic of their junior year abroad. Through an indirect path, he took over a small boutique gourmet coffee retailer based in San Francisco and Seattle and turned it into a national brand that fed the narcissism of college-educated gentry and convinced them to pay extravagant prices for cups of coffee by giving everything fancy-schmancy names. But the show left out the rest of the story: the gentry has found itself in a precarious situation. Having once retired rich on the basis of one formula, he returned to find that formula was no longer w...

Amid all the hubbub over the Nashville shooter and the Trans Day of Vengeance, I'm wondering if I'm the only person who recognized that the instructions for those planning to avenge things include "Assemble at SCOTUS -- Wear a Mask -- Bring a Buddy". While there are several variations on this basic sign, and not all contain the "Wear a Mask" instruction, that at least one variation would say this is telling. "Wear a Mask" is so 2022. What message are they trying to send? I'm sure there will be well-publicized scenes from the demonstration, and we'll just have to wait and see how many people actually turn up in masks. But during the COVID panic, not a few observers noted that ordinary cloth or paper masks had no efficacy in limiting the spread of an airborne virus, Dr Fauci famously reversed his own position on masking, and the refusal of airlines and key transit agencies to continue mask enforcement by the middle of last year marked th...

Yesterday I brought up my struggle as I approached adulthood with the idea of "natural law", which I said, having been raised Protestant, was new to me around the time I went to college. I instinctively associated it with Catholic thought, and at least in a way, I was correct. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , If any moral theory is a theory of natural law, it is Aquinas’s. . . . For Aquinas, there are two key features of the natural law . . . . The first is that, when we focus on God’s role as the giver of the natural law, the natural law is just one aspect of divine providence; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective just one part among others of the theory of divine providence. The second is that, when we focus on the human’s role as recipient of the natural law, the natural law constitutes the principles of practical rationality, those principles by which human action is to be judged as reasonable or unreasonable; and so the theo...

More than a dozen years ago, my doctor told me I needed to start monitoring my blood sugar and changing my diet to keep things within limits. So I did, and my readings stayed within normal parameters for some time, or they did until the COVID lockdowns, masking, and social distancing. Once I was allowed to go back to the doctor -- remember, this activity was proscribed as well -- he began to worry, my numbers were climbing to the point that something might need to be done. But my diet hadn't changed at all, although given the lockdowns and everything, I wasn't getting as much exercise. In any case, for nearly three years after 2020, my blood sugar readings were wildly erratic, and the doctor was getting more and more worried, although my diet hadn't changed, other than a few foods becoming unavailable due to the pandemic-related supply chain crisis. Then all of a sudden, the pandemic went away, or more precisely, everyone was catching COVID in spite of everyone havin...

It looks like the story of multiple FBI informants within the Proud Boys isn't going away. The New York Times interviewed Agent CHS-SA, Jennilyn Salinas AKA "Jen Loh", on Friday -- this version seems to be the same as the Times story , which is behind a paywall. However, I'm posting excerpts out of order. The first is nearly at the end of the story: Ms. Loh said that she began working with the F.B.I.’s office in San Antonio, Texas in 2018 or 2019 after falling victim to an attack from what she described as activists from the leftist movement antifa. At first, she said, she gave the bureau what she believed was “useful information” on leftist protesters. Soon, however, she began getting paid for her work. At that point, Ms. Loh, who once served as a top official in an organization called Latinos for Trump, started providing information to the F.B.I. on “any type of domestic terrorism — on the right or the left,” she said. So OK, as far back as five years a...

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit quotes a James Taranto piece at the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall: In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. [Gov Brian] Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.” The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20. That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows: “Look, t...