In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Elon Musk explained the basic problem in a CNBC interview last night : the sitting President of the United States is a hybrid of a hologram and Louis XVI. This echoes an interview he gave Tucker Carlson last month , not long before Carlson was airbrushed from the picture: “I would prefer, frankly, that we put just a normal person as president, a normal person with common sense and whose values are smack in the middle of the country, just center of the normal distribution and I think that they would be great,” Musk told Tucker Carlson of Fox News in an interview which aired on the cable network on Tuesday. But isn't this just a sideways explanation for the Bud Light phenomenon? Bud Light decided to privilege an unarguably not-normal person as its brand spokestrans, and the normal distribution staged a revolt. But none of the marketing experts who've tried to deliver explanations has come close to the real point: yes, beer is a working-class drink. Yes, working-class guys ...

I woke up this morning to discover that a Miller Lite ad from Women's History Month last March has gone viral. I watched several YouTubes on the ad -- indeed, a couple of YouTubers have already done multiple videos on it -- and just trying to parse out the message, as far as I can tell, its pitch is that Miller ads used to be sexist back in the day, because they featured women in bikinis. However, Miller now regrets this, apparently because women actually invented beer, or something like that. So Miller has more or less begun a campaign to get people to look in their garages for old beer ads, or something like that, and maybe send them in to Miller, which will shred them and turn them into compost. Miller will then either donate the compost to hop growers, who will donate the hops to women-owned breweries, or maybe donate the compost to women-owned breweries directly so they can start to grow the hops themselves, or something like that. But I don't see any place Miller w...

Over the past six months, I've gradually moved toward the conservative position on the Ukraine war. I've recognized that Ukraine hawks are basically neoconservatives, and neoconservative policies haven't played well since Reagan. Still, I was inclined to buy Zelensky's talking point last year that supporting Ukraine was a cheap way to dismantle the Russian empire. Whether dismantling the Russian empire was a goal worth pursuing is a separate question, and I more or less lost sight of the fact that whatever else, it's a neoconservative certainty that this must be done. The problem is that here we are in the middle of 2023. A predicted Ukrainian winter counteroffensive never took place. There was lots of anticipation for a spring counteroffensive that was supposed to happen, maybe in April, but this keeps getting pushed back. Here's Reuters on April 28 : Ukraine is wrapping up preparations for a counteroffensive against Russian forces and is largely read...

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released a report on Biden family business dealings . In total, Biden family members and business associates designed a web of over 20 companies, many of which were formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency, the committee revealed. In total, the Biden family, business associates, and companies received over $10 million from foreign nationals’ companies, the committee found. The story doesn't have a whole lot of detail, but from what I can gather, the payments totaling $10 millian trickled in via shell corporations over a period between 2014 and 2017, and they were paid to nine Biden family members who were named in the report, as well as mostly unnamed family associates, who would have included figures like Robinson Walker, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin. If we divide $10 million by nine family members plus associates over a period of maybe three years, this comes to an average of well under a million bucks a year for each. Y...

As I noted yesterday, my gut reaction to the first reports I saw on the Trump CNN town hall was uh-oh. If I could parse it out into sentences, it would be that his opponents had nothing new, Trump was simply bypassing the nothing-new with his charisma, and the audience was loving it. They loved it even more when Kaitlan Collins's head kept exploding and, as one commentator put it, she kept acting like everyone's ex-wife. What I began to notice Thursday was that Trump's town hall performance simply overwhelmed the rest of the news, even though the rest of the news -- the deep state ignoring congressional subpoenas, the Comer committee releasing details of Biden family money laundering, and the border chaos -- was on balance poison for the Biden administration. Never mind that, everyone wanted to talk about Trump. Six months ago, I was convinced that Trump had misread Ukraine, he'd proved disastrously weak against Fauci and Birx, his vaccine program was a failure, an...

The photo at the top is of Kaitlan Collins, the 31 year old CNN former chief White House Correspondent whose disastrous performance at Wednesday's Trump town hall caused rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. The photo below her is Dylan Mulvaney, the trans female whose disastrous performance as a Bud Light surrogate six weeks ago has continued to cause rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. I'm surprised at how few commentators have pointed out how much they look like each other. Maybe if that light bulb had gone on over the head of someone like Mr Licht at CNN, the outcome of the town hall would have been different. As it is, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the sort of gadfly the Democrats need right now, characteried Donald Trump as a result of Wednesday night's performance as " the most devastating debater, probably, since Abraham Lincoln ". I didn't watch the CNN town hall Wednesday night; it was only when I saw ...

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...