In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

John Hinderaker asks good questions in a brief post at the Power Line blog : Where do these people come from? How did thy get into MIT, Penn, etc.? . . . I don’t think these educational institutions have any idea how terrible they look to the general public. And I don’t think we can begin to calculate the long-range consequences of the utter moral failure of higher education that we are now witnessing. But let's keep in mind that before the Hamas issue put the Ivies in the forefront, they'd already drawn public attention in recent months for bringing us a series of con artists, crooks, and incompetents like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Stockton Rush, and Alissa Heinerscheid. Jeffrey Epstein, who never graduatrd from any four-year institution, nevertheless hitchhiked on Harvard's and MIT's prestige by involving them in his philanthropic hustle. And I've talked about the Ivy admissions problem, for instance here . where I noted that the most recent cro...

I found this today : During the third debate, Vivek Ramaswamy called for RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to resign, citing the party's "culture of losing." Now, Ron DeSantis is throwing more gasoline on the fire, announcing that he is going to defy a threat from McDaniel to disqualify any candidate who attends an upcoming forum in Iowa. According to an October 28th letter, the RNC has deemed the Family Leader Thanksgiving Forum, hosted by Bob Vander Plaats, to be a "debate." That would supposedly violate the pledge the candidates signed in order to participate in the RNC debates, though there's a good case to be made they are stretching the definition of term to absurd lengths. But I went to Real Clear Politics for the latest Republican polling average and found this: Trump 58.5 DeSantis 14.4 Haley 9.0 Ramaswamy 4.7 Then I found this at The Hill : Fewer than 7 million people watched Wednesday night’s third Republican presi...

Dialogue that's beginning to emerge from recent days in Trump's New York trial is giving me the impression that Judge Engoron has already backed himself into reversible territory, and he knows it. Via Forbes from last week: Engoron’s law clerk has been a source of contention throughout the trial, after Trump made a disparaging post in the trial’s first week sharing a false rumor about the clerk and suggesting she was politically biased against him, prompting the judge to impose a gag order barring parties in the case from speaking about court staff. The "false rumor" was news that a complaint had been filed with the New York State Bar Association against Judge Engoron's chief clerk, Allison Greenfield, for violating judicial rules preventing officers of the court from making excessive political donations. [I]n 2022 alone, Greenfield gave $3,335 in political donations to Democrat candidates and causes in New York—more than six times the maximum allowed...

I don't know which way Judge Engoron swings, and it isn't my business, but it seems like he's setting himself up as a bizarre foil for Trump's Chicago Seven strategy. BREAKING: The judge presiding over Trump's NYC trial appears to have a peculiar hobby of posting half-naked photos of himself on a high school alumni newsletter he controls as reported on by @MarcoPolo501c3 . The 74-year-old judge Arthur Engoron appeared to even post a… pic.twitter.com/JW2ArmxzzN — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 7, 2023 Alan Dershowitz, before the latest revelation of the judge's bathroom selfies, came to the same conclusion in this YouTube post: At 3:42, he begins, . . . back at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s before most of you were born, there was a famous trial in America, it was called the trial of the Chicago Seven. It tas during the 1968 presidential conventions in Chicago that a group of radicals headed by people like Abby Hoffman, left-wi...

I've followed Alan Dershowitz for much of my life, and I would have to say I've frequently agreed with him, even at times where he's been, in his own characterization, a traditional 1960s-style liberal. More recently, I find myself agreeing with him even more. Over the weekend, he published an op-ed in the UK Daily Mail, ALAN DERSHOWITZ says vile Leftist anti-Israeli hate will turn millions of American Jews from Blue to Red - and he's one . The Democratic Party now faces a choice. The Hamas atrocities of October 7th have forever fractured any political alliance between centrist and liberal Jews and woke, anti-Israel progressives. It's either them or us. The coalition is at civil war. This is a point similar to the one I've been making, that the highly successful New Deal alliance of the 1930s and 1940s, which included labor; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; northern philanthropic wealth; and southern segregationists, contained contradictions that b...

There's another big takeaway from rhe story I linked in yesterday's post about the schism within the United Methodist Church: Pope Benedict's 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus was initially directed not just to disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians, but to members of other, Anglican-derived denominations, such as Methodists or African Methodist Episcopal members. However, this has almost entirely been removed from odrdinariate documentation, with only this vestigial reference on the US ordinariate web site: Former Anglicans and Methodists who have already become Catholic and wish to join the Ordinariate may submit an application form to the Ordinariate. However, Wikipedia has kept the earlier intent : A personal ordinariate for former Anglicans, shortened as personal ordinariate or Anglican ordinariate, is an ordinariate, a canonical structure within the Catholic Church established in order to enable "groups of Anglicans" and Method...

As a relatively new Catholic convert, I've been reluctant to say anything about the synod recently completed in Rome, except to note what Fr James Martin himself has concludeed about it : One of these issues was L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, particularly since this community was explicitly mentioned in the Instrumentum Laboris twice. It was also mentioned in half of the reports submitted by episcopal conferences from around the world. Many hoped that the synod would find ways to speak explicitly about reaching out to this community in new ways. Also there were unreasonably high expectations that the synod would, for example, somehow ratify the blessings of same-sex unions. But that second option was never going to happen on that or any other issue; the synod is consultative, not deliberative. The synod does not have the power to change any church practice; it can only suggest. Still, the lack of any mention of the term “L.G.B.T.Q.” in the final synthesis, called “A Synodal Church ...