In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The History Channel's The Food That Built America is a slick and glitzy business-school style "whig history" that covers why we have the wonderful frozen waffles, fried chicken, fast-food burgers, or packaged luncheon meats we have in this best of all possible consumer worlds. It can sometimes be vaguely informative, and even when it isn't, it gives some insight into the thought processes of the people who fancy they control the planet. This past Sunday's episode is important for what it leaves out, since it chronicles how that wonderful product Bud Light became the top US beer, which is perfect anyhow. I'll grant that the episode must have been produced and in the can before last March, when a trans influencer singlehandedly destroyed the brand in a matter of weeks, but even if it hadn't been finished by then, that part of the story would have been so alien to the show's mission that they'd probably have had to scrap the whole episode rather...

Via The New York Post : Mulvaney — who recently escaped to Peru to “feel safe” from the backlash and boycotts hounding her and the fizzling beer brand — offered up her [sic] services in an Instagram post Wednesday. “Booking speaking opportunities for the upcoming 23/24 school year and would love to come visit,” she told her [sic] 2 million followers. My impression of the college lecture circuit has always been that it features faded celebrities and other special pleaders past their sell-by dates. From my own time as an undergraduate in the 1960s, I remember Judy Garland (then, though still alive, largely a gay cult icon); Madalyn Murray O'Hair (prominent in the anti-school prayer movement, who quickly faded after the Supreme Court outlawed it); Immanuel Velikovsky (author of the 1950 Worlds in Collision , which argued that Biblical miracles were a misreading of astronomical catastrophes); and Michael Meeropol (son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who argued his parents ...

Last Thursday, I posted on the details we know about the baggie of coke that was found in a cubby outside the White House Situation Room , and I concluded that nothing really fit. Former Secret Service agents are unanimous that nobody who isn't the president, vice president, or a member of their immediate families gets into the business areas of the White House without a search, which includes metal detectors and emptying of pockets, as well as drug sniffing dogs. In other words, it's highly unlikely that either an outsider or a staff member could bring cocaine in. On the other hand, if the suspect is a protectee, which is to say Hunter himself, the mathematics of addiction say that someone like Hunter needs a lot more than a random baggie of cocaine to satisfy his habit. He needs near-industrial quantities of coke, and it just isn't worth his trouble to smuggle in a baggie at a time; the supply is too small and unreliable. The Secret Service people say it...

Via the UK Daily Mail , Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong. . . . While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com. . . . It is not clear what substance was in Morris's bong, and recreational marijuana use is legal in California. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This vignette raises several important questions for me, but it begins to answer one I posed a couple of weeks ago about Hunter and Kevin: Do they do coke together? I don't think this bodes well for Hunter's future. Kevin Morris is not a serious guy. Bongs actually came after my time doing this sort of thing in college (which I did on and off for about 18 months but outgrew pretty quickly), when all we had was old-fashioned joints, so I wen...

In a post last week , I said I was skeptical of reports that some Democrats are trying to find a younger candidate who can replace Joe Biden as their 2024 nominee because, as I said at that time, Joe Biden is their only hope of claiming to maintain the nearly expired New Deal coalition. In fact, it seems to me that if they want a viable national candidate who could actually do this, they have a perfectly good one in Robert Kennedy Jr, whom they currently abjure. This isn't to say that they don't see a legitimate problem in Biden, although yet again, I don't think a medical diagnosis is needed to point it out. Take his meeting with Israel's President Herzog at the White House Tuesday, where he's reported to have said, “The Israelis and the Palestinians… uh… on a political level… They uh, and… uh… They uh… And, I… Agwai endhole and whole shegwam… And uh…” said Biden. The fact-checkers insisted that the big guy wasn't asleep , he was just reading fr...

I certainly agree that the unanswered question of who brought the baggie into the cubby outside the Sit Room is important, but I'm less and less convinced the answer has much to do with Hunter. Let's take the latest theory from Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who's been serving as the vehicle for unnamed colleagues still on the force who are expressing their skepticism about the investigation. As of Tuesday, he was saying : “Let’s just say a friend called me up and said, ‘Don’t preclude the possibility that the cocaine found in the White House there was not accidentally left behind.’ In other words, it was left there deliberately for someone to find, and let you say someone else may have found it. So that’s the story I kind of heard from someone who may know a little something about something. We’ll see what happens, but they know who it is. I’m sure of it.” As best I can translate this, he seems to be saying that the baggie was something like a dead drop,...

Ever since Bp Robert Barron heartily endorsed this past spring's TV series Mrs Davis , calling it "my favorite show", I've been anxious to watch it. Nevertheless, although he's discussed it in at least two podcasts, and on one, his interlocutor warns viewers that there are content issues and "don't show it to your prayer group", I can agree that it isn't a Catholic film. He says at the link, Now if you’re looking to Mrs. Davis for theological precision, you will be severely disappointed (and please don’t write me letters reminding me of how weird its theology is; I know), but there is indeed a spiritual motif of supreme importance that stands at the very heart of the show, and it is well worth plowing through all of the intense oddness to grasp it. It has to do with idolatry and, more precisely, with our tendency to create idols. Wikipeida calls it "an American science fiction comedy drama", which puts it in the same genre as...