In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I was going to post on something else this morning, but the reactions I discovered to Trump's town hall on CNN last night in this morning's news diverted me. Last month I posted about "Trump's role as truth-teller, the Huckleberry Finn, the Holden Caulfield, the Caleb Trask or Jim Stark as played by James Dean", but there I was only close. Trump is something like those, but he's even closer to Froggy Gremlin : Froggy the Gremlin was a character created by Smilin' Ed McConnell and brought to radio in the 1940s and television in 1950s on the Smilin' Ed's Gang show, and later Andy's Gang TV show, hosted by actor Andy Devine after McConnell's death. Froggy was a troublemaker. Disrespectful of adult authority figures, Froggy played practical jokes and disrupted the presentations of other guests. If a guest were to demonstrate how to paint a wall, he might say, "And now I'm going to take this can of paint..." Froggy would...

Recall that after the 2020 election, I compared the Democrat situation to the problem of apocalyptic cultists who believed the world was about to end on a date certain. I said that if I knew the world was going to end, my reaction would be to run up my credit cards in the final month so that I could buy everything I wanted and enjoy it before the big asteroid hit the planet, but since the world would end on that date, I'd never have to pay anything back. As I saw it then, the problem for the Democrats was that they'd won a narrow electoral victory in November, but they'd have to set the results in stone before another election took place in 2022 -- or in oher words, they were running up the credit cards with promises to pay the bills and assuming the world would end before they came due. The difficulty was the world didn't end, as it has always tended not to, and the 2022 election happened anyhow. The Democrats lost in 2022 by less than some optimistic predictio...

Alan Dershowitz has an interesting commentary on the Jordan Neely episode, wherein a mentally unstable homeless man who was behaving bizarrely and apparently threatening New York subway riders was killed after a former Marine, assisted by other passengers, placed him in a chokehold with the intent of holding him for police. The question he asks, "Should ex marine be charged for killing subway screamer?" he answers, somewhat predictably, with, "it depends." But he makes several other remarks that I think reflect his current wider views on society. At about 7:00, he says Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, if the [ex-Marine] had been black and the homless person had been white, would AOC be saying anything? Of course not! Well, maybe she would be saying something, but not what she said about this case. This is all about race, the fact that the victim in this case was African-American and that the alleged perpetrator is white changes everything. That...

This has been a background newes item for some time, but a California panel has been studying the issue of reparations for slavery : In October 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed Bill AB 3121 into law — creating the nation’s first ever task force to study and recommend reparations for slavery. This past Saturday, it issued a predictable set of recommendations : California's reparations task force voted Saturday to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies. The nine-member committee, which first convened nearly two years ago, gave final approval at a meeting in Oakland to a hefty list of proposals that now go to state lawmakers to consider for reparations legislation. . . . Some estimates from economists have projected that the state could owe upwards of $800 billion, or more than 2.5 times its annual budget, in reparations to Black people. California entere...

I've always thought that Sam Bankman-Fried was basically Jeffrey Epstein 2.0 -- both had perfected the skill of convincing people they were something they weren't, for instance, good at math. Although he never had a four-year degree in anything, Epstein got his first job teaching math and physics at the exclusive Dalton School, whose headmaster had been William Barr's father, apparently because he convinced "Ace" Greenberg, CEO of Bear Stearns, that he was good at those things. Epstein went on to build a highly successful career on smoke and mirrors -- even during his lifetime, there was occasional puzzlement over exactly how he made his money, and since his death, there still haven't been satisfactory answers. The one thing we're sure about is we can't be sure about anything. As of 2019, the consensus was something like this : Now, a new book is attempting to fill in those chilling details - with journalist Dylan Howard and a team of inve...

Yesterday, Mark Dice asked a question I haven't heard anyplace else : what is Bud Light going to do for Pride Month, which is coming up in June? Apparently they've had major campaigns in the past, as the artwork above reflects. Are they going to try to pull this off again? They've already gone out of their way to put themselves between a rock and a hard place. For instance, Though it didn’t come in June, Bud Light recently made a play for queer consumers when it produced a single can of the brand’s beer featuring trans TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s likeness. On April 1, Mulvaney made an Instagram post promoting Bud Light to her nearly 2 million followers. But the company’s response to the conservative backlash that followed suggests that its campaign didn’t come with any real commitment to inclusion. . . . After what's been reported as a significant dip in sales, the company tucked tail and sought to distance itself from Mulvaney. Anheuser-Busch C...

It looks like after more than a month of the ongoing Dylan Mulvaney-Bud Light debacle, Anheuser and its parent have settled on a communications strategy: their market is overreacting. Per the Daily Wire: Anheuser-Busch is trying to convince wholesalers that the Dylan Mulvaney controversy that has caused sales of Bud Light to plummet has been overblown. The brewery sent a letter to wholesalers about the backlash to the trans-identifying influencer posting a TikTok video with a can of Bud Light that had Mulvaney’s face on it. In the video, Mulvaney celebrated 365 days of “being a woman.” “This was one single can given to one social media influencer,” the letter declares. “It was not made for production or sale to the general public. This can is not a formal campaign or advertisement.” It looks like the global conglomerate that owns Anheuser Busch has signed on to this version aS well. Per CNN: Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris addressed the Bud Light controversy in the c...