In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

So after two weeks of radio silence, Anheuser Busch sent out its US CEO to issue a bland non-apology for the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. I went looking for pictures of Brendan Whitworth, and what I found was what you'd expect -- he's a pretty boy, there to look good at employee town halls, but someone else is running the show. People have been parsing out just what he intended to say in his statement , but I think the real lesson in this episode is that everyone has a boss, including the US CEO of Anheuser. Over a two-wwek period when Bud Light went radio silent on social media, yuou can bet there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter between New York and Brussels, where Mr Whitworth's bosses are, about the impact of the Dyhlan Mulvaney controversy, with Whitworth giving happy talk, the way pretty boy CEOs do, about how this is just a blip, it'll all blow over, and so forth. Finally the bosses in Brussels lost patience and told him to say something, except by this point h...

William Barr is still holding to the theory that some sort of Establishment -- into which he has special insight -- is pushing the various cases against Trump in order to stampede Republicans into nominating him as a sure loser for 2024. I've said here that at minimum, this violates the law of parsimony, since it's too complicated a theory. Alan Dershowitz, a smarter guy, has been putting forward a simpler theory all along, which agrees with public statements by Trump's current prosecutor Alvin Bragg, that his indictment is meant simply to prevent Trump's 2024 candidacy in the first place. Barr made his case on Trump most recently last night: “I said he’s frequently his own worst enemy and he digs himself holes,” Barr said on CNN Primetime on Thursday night. “And he does some things that are reckless that are clearly gonna give rise to investigations and look into them. And that included both the documents in Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 episode.” ...

Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is impressionistic and somewhat scattershot, but it's peppered with insights that are still productive almost two generations later. Wolfe is not a systematic social theorist, but one point he makes throughout his writing is that the American working class isn't behaving the way a proletariat should -- instead, in an era of prosperity, they take the money and run. I reread the essay because, reading Emma Jo Morris's series on Survivors of the Trans Panic , she mentions gnosticism, and I recalled that Tom Wolfe mentioned it there as well. Speaking of New Age movements like Arica, Esalen, and Scientology that characterized the 1970s, he said, I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just...

I spent my last two years of high school in Bethesda, which even in the 1960s was in the vanguard of secularism -- where I definitely lucked out was that even though my sister went to the exclusive National Cathedral School, some of my acquaintances there went to Sidwell Friends, and my college roommate went to St Albans, I went to one of the county public schools, although the culture there was equivalent (I dated the daughters of the DC Bar Association president and the US Ambassador to Mali). Somehow in that culture there was a sense in the atmosphere that the human race was evolving, and it was time to leave behind any childish or primitive reliance on religion. It wasn't just Hugh Hefner who argued that religious proscriptions on this or that were of a piece with Old Testament dietary restrictions, which were perfectly fine for their day as a way to prevent food poisoning and such, but now we have refrigeration, so we have to rethink these things. By the same token, tradit...

A couple of montha ago, on February 24, I used the photo of a Stasi informant above at the top of a post covering the February 2023 leak of a memo from the FBI Richmond field office talking about the danger of traditionalist Catholics, the sort who go to Latin mass, and how they might turn into domestic terrorsts. As of March 23, the FBI issued a statement saying that the "Domain Perspective (report) did not meet the FBI's exacting standards and was withdrawn." He added, "Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters removed it from our internal system. The FBI also initiated a review — which is now ongoing." In my February 24 post, I asked, Given this is the FBI, I'm suddenly suspicious that they say they've removed a document, but, er, have they stopped paying any informants who've been spying on Catholics suspected of attending Latin masses? They said nothing about that in their annoucement, but given that by their own admission, the...

I've been following the news releases on the Walter Reed National Medical Center terminating its contract with Holy Name College, a community of Franciscan priests and brothers that had provided pastoral care to service members and veterans there for nearly two decades. Frankly, most of the accounts seem to leave important information out. The most complete is the news release from the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA . I also found the Archdiocese's statement of its mission very helpful. It says in part: The Archdiocese serves as the sole endorser (certifier) of Roman Catholic chaplains to the United States government. A Roman Catholic priest cannot serve within the United States Military as a priest without the express permission of the Archdiocese. . . . The Archdiocese is the sole endorser of chaplains for the Veterans Administration hospitals. In 2008, 242 priests were endorsed for service in the Veterans Administration. . . . Unlike a conve...

Ann Coulter this past week: The endless stream of preposterous charges against Trump only helped him. So why not launch another ridiculous accusation to help him get the nomination? That’s exactly what they did in last year’s GOP primaries, supporting Trump’s nut-bar candidates, knowing they would go on to lose the general election. By boosting Trump’s candidates, Democrats managed to pull out a historic midterm victory for Biden. And now, they’re doing it again, trying to trick Republicans into choosing the worst possible presidential nominee. Guess what? It’s working! New GOP motto: unable to learn from the third kick of a mule. In response to Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday, all conservative media swept aside news of out-of-control crime, chaos at the border, fentanyl overdoses and the looming recession. Their No. 1 job became: SAVE TRUMP! A major conservative talk radio host even suggested DeSantis stand down and endorse Trump. In this case, Ms Coulter is echoing William Ba...