In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I ran into a remarkably obtuse essay by Joel Kotkin at Real Clear Politics this morning, Donald Trump has scrambled the old class allegiances . I don't follow Kotkin, but according to Wikipedia , Kotkin is the author of several books. The New Class Conflict was published in September 2014 by Telos Press Publishing. In this book, Kotkin assesses the changing complexities of class in the United States, which he argues can no longer be understood in terms of traditional political divisions between left and right or conservative and liberal. For Kotkin, the new class order of the twenty-first century is marked by the rise of a high-tech oligarchy, a culturally dominant academic and media (both journalism and entertainment) elite, an expansive government bureaucracy, and a declining middle class. So he's an expert on class, but in the current essay, Kotkin gets about half of everything wrong. He begins, US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class po...

I'm not sure what this signifies, but I'm belatedly learning that between the death of Benedict XVI and the election of Leo XIV, several related conspiracy theories have emerged. Since I'm a Catholic convert, I should point out that if I thought there was a grain of truth to any of them, I would have to revert to my childhood Presbyterianism, but so far, that hasn't happened. The most recent elaboration of this set of theories is contained in the hour-long YouTube post embedded above, in which Michael Lebron, who posts on the YouTube channel Lionel Nation, interviews Erik Thaddeus Walters, an adjunct associate professor at John Cabot University in Rome, which caters to English-speaking students who for whatever reason find themselves there. His D Phil is from the University of Vienna. Mr Lebron, who jokingly says he's not a conspiracy theorist but a conspiracy analyst, has had several interviews like this with Dr Walters in the runup to the just-concluded c...

When I learned that Robert Francis Prevost had been named the new pope, I was convinced I'd seen the name somewhere before. As my wife and I drove to mass yesterday morning, it was confirmed: we found ourselves right behind a Prevost bus on city streets that led us almost all the way to the parish. From Wikipedia , Prevost . . . formally known as Prevost Car, is a Canadian manufacturer of touring coaches and bus shells for high-end motorhomes and specialty conversions. The company is a subsidiary of the Volvo Buses division of the Volvo Group. Even before that, once I saw photos of Leo XIV, I decided I liked any pope who wears glasses, as Pius XII did in my childhood. In fact, at that time, both President Truman and the pope wore glasses. Something basic has been restored. As I've begun to feel reassured, The Guardian is not so much : After years of sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis, LGBTQ+ Catholics expressed concern on Thursday about hostile ...

Ed Driscoll, one of the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit, links to a piece at American Greatness that compares Sen Fetterman to, of all people, the Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov : Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. . . . He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.” . . . Sakharov had been diagnosed in absentia with “sluggish schizophrenia,” a condition identified and articulated (i.e. “made up”) by the founding father of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky. Like countless others in the Soviet Union, Sakharov ran afoul of the regime, and, as a result, was labeled “mentally unfit” by that regime. . . . The Soviet Union was a monstrous place that did monstrous things to nonconformists and called it “concern” for their me...

Weird: Man Becomes More Conservative As He Regains Brain Function https://t.co/6nesG1N1WN pic.twitter.com/TcQ2n21Rx7 — The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 6, 2023 A piece by Christopher Nicholas at Real Clear Politics raises an insightful poimt: Is there any Democrat around today who even comes close to Trump’s dominance in the attention economy? To me, there’s just one: John Fetterman. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are a distant second. Fetterman is a walking “look at me” sign – given the contrast between his appearance and his diction and his education pedigree. In the course of nominating Sen Fetterman for Loser of the Week on Mark Halperin's Morning Meeting program yesterday, Sean Spicer noted, . . . the John Fetterman phenomenon. and so I'll say it less about the person and more of this "oh, he's the second coming" and "he's gonna be our savior", a guy who's running around in a Carh...

I've been hesitant to post about the new pontiff, not least because just about everything that's come out of Rome since the passing of Francis has been hackneyed and unreliable. Cardinal Parolin, for example, was the sure front runner. But just as important, I'm a Catholic convert of about a dozen years standing, and the one thing I want to avoid is taking the attitude that Rome has gotten it all wrong, and I know how to straighten things out. With that preface, the big hackneyed headline I've seen for the paat 24 hours has been AMERICAN POPE! But as best I can tell, although he grew up and went to Catholic schools in the Chicago area, then Villanova University, and then an MDiv from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago in 1982, after this, at age 27, he appears to have spent nearly all of his career in either Rome or Peru. He is a US citizen by birth but also a naturalized Peruvian citizen. It's difficult to know if he's been in touch with US life for ...

There seems to be a high-level campaign to put Joe Biden back on the public stage : Former President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will join ABC's "The View" on Thursday for their first joint interview post-presidency. The couple will join the show live in-studio to discuss life after the White House, the Democratic Party's election losses in 2024, and the current political landscape following President Donald Trump's first 100 days, ABC News reported. The former president had his first post-White House interview with the BBC on Wednesday, in which he criticized President Trump's foreign policy, saying his peace deal between Ukraine and Russia would be "modern-day appeasement," and slammed the Republican president's threats to obtain Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Via Politico this morning , In a sign of Biden’s intent to remain engaged publicly, his inner circle tapped Chris Meagher, a former Biden deputy press sec...