Dylan's 15 Minutes Of Fame Are Up

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 had been falsely accused of espionage, something he and his brother eventually retracted in part).

According to the them website,

It’s unclear what exactly Mulvaney will be up to next. “So, right now, I’m thinking about longevity — how do I hopefully have a career that goes on for the next 40 years?” she told Them. “And how do I be happy outside of social media? Because that’s what I think I’m retraining my brain to figure out: All the other aspects of my life have to be just as important as that one.”

The overwhelming puzzle of Dylan Mulvaney is how he managed to inspire what has proven to be one of the most successful product boycotts of all time. One commentator called it not just a brand boycott, but a brand revulsion, and there's an important distinction there. A boycott is an essentially political phenomenon that may have limited short-term success. The closest example might be the boycott of Dow Chemical over napalm in the 1960s:

Dow was not known as a defense contractor — in fact, until its Pentagon contract, the business was best known for making industrial chemicals and household plastics like Saran Wrap.

But over the next few years, as Americans began seeing gruesome images of South Vietnamese children with horrific napalm burns, the antiwar movement set its sights on the company.

Activists boycotted Dow Chemical’s products, staged protests at its recruiting events on college campuses and barraged its executives with accusations of unethical war profiteering.

. . . All told, the $5 million napalm contract most likely cost Dow Chemical billions of dollars. And it was the kind of unforced error that could have been avoided if company executives had listened to early signs of opposition, done some risk analysis and changed course.

But even the emotional impact of photos showing children with napalm burns fades in comparison with images of Dylan Mulvaney that produce more like a disgust instinct that's implied in the characterization of a "brand revulsion", or the suggestion that blue-collar males now avoid drinking the brand because women will think they're gay. According to Wikipedia,

It is believed that the emotion of disgust has evolved as a response to offensive foods that may cause harm to the organism. A common example of this is found in human beings who show disgust reactions to mouldy milk or contaminated meat. Disgust appears to be triggered by objects or people who possess attributes that signify disease.

It would seem there's a great deal to be said about the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon and how it appears to have produced something like mass disgust. One thing that's clear is that after the Bud Light influencer deal, Mulvaney will never be asked to endorse another major brand.

What if he were to reflect on his situation and produce an account where he could speak with genuine insight into his experience? That might be worth hearing. Otherwise, he's still likely to cast about for something todo over the next 40 years.

A Former Addict Solves My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

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's the protectees who are never searched, so logically, we would expect Hunter to bring his own drugs in anyhow. Why would he need a drop at all? That just doesn't make sense.

Jesse Watters interviewed Jordan Belfort, the so-called "Wolf of Wall Street" and a former cocaine addict, on his Fox News program this past Monday evening, and as an ex-addict, he was able to clarify the potential issues surrounding Hunter's situation, while making it clear that he was speculating, and Hunter has not been tried or convicted. The Fox segment is shown via a YouTube at the top of this post, while the text quotes are from the UK Daily Mail's account of the program.

'Obviously I don't know for sure, but here's my theory,' he said. 'The obvious person to point to is Hunter Biden.

'Why? Because of the action - what people aren't focusing on is why would someone take it out of their pocket and leave it somewhere?

'The answer is because, when you're in that mindset of an addict, you want to have little 'drop points' so you can kind of sneak in, take a quick hit, leave it there for safekeeping, and come back. So it was being stored somewhere.

'In other words, you could easily keep it in your pocket and get in and out without getting detected, so the person that put it there had to be there on a consistent basis to keep using it undetected.'

So the Dan Bongino theory that I quoted last week and found implausible was that someone was bringing the cocaine in a baggie at a time and leaving it in a drop for Hunter to pick up later. Mr Belfort's theory is that Hunter has already brought a much larger quantity in and is simply secreting small amounts of it around the White House for convenience, and this cubby is one of them. This resolves my doubt about the baggie as a reliable way to smuggle the drug in from outside, and it also addresses the problem that Hunter needs a much bigger supply than baggie-level over the course of a day.

Mr Belfort also addressed the issue of whether Hunter has turned his life around, kicked his habits, and is now clean and sober.

'People don't typically stop using the drug unless they've suffered massive consequences,' he told Watters.

And this guy hasn't suffered consequences for anything - whether it's not declaring taxes, whether it's going on the board of Burisma - like why was he there? - whether it's becoming a famous artist overnight and selling scribble-scrabble for like hundreds of thousands of pounds - no consequences there.

'So why would he have stopped using drugs, I wonder, when there's no consequences?'

But this brings me back to the question of what the Secret Service knows, and the degree to which they're looking the other way over Hunter's drug use. Consider that the cubby outside the Sit Room would be just one potential spot where an addict like Hunter or Mr Belfort might secrete small amounts of a drug as a stash of convenience. In that case, when the question comes up over which location the July 2 cocaine was found -- the library, the lobby cubby, or the Sit Room cubby -- the answer might well be all of them. That could in fact have been the source of the confusion after that story broke.

This also goes to a question that came to mind after I posted on Hunter's visit with Keven Morris yesterday. I assume the Secret Service escort waited in the black SUV in which they'd driven Hunter to his "meeting" to take him back to where he was staying afterward. But in that case, even if he hadn't been smoking weed from a bong himself, he'd have been reeking of it from just being in the same room with Morris. If they had no other sign of what Hunter was up to before this, they'd have a good idea then. But this is presumably a regular detail, they know their protectee, and their protectee is regularly vioating federal law; not just cocaine, but marijuana is still illegal federally. What are their instructions?

This actually brings me to my last question: for the past several months, although nobody knows for sure, it's been more or less assumed that Hunter has been living in the White House, where he can be kept on a shorter leash. With the Sit Room episode, people like Mr Belfort are credibly inferring that under those circumstances, Hunter has been stashing cocaine all over the residence and offices to support his habit. It may well be that Joe has been getting advice that this has become unsustainable, the risk of another such discovery that might be more provably tied to Hunter is too great, and it's time for him to leave.

The trouble is that as soon as he's left -- which might be what's led to him being found smoking weed with Kevin Morris in LA -- he's going to revert to even more risky behavior like what he was doing from 2015 to 2019. For Joe, this is basically just two bad options, either drugs in the White House, or something even worse outside of it. But my bet is that a year or so ago, Hunter's minders at the Malibu compound had been warning Joe that Hunter was basically getting out of control there, which is why he was brought into the White House.

Something more is likely to break, sooner rather than later. At minimum, Kevin Morris is not the kind of guy you want Hunter hanging around with. But that brings up another question: what's in it for Kevin Morris? Running around with Hunter, at least right now, is a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone who does it. What does Kevin Morris need something like that for?

As I Suspected

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 went to Wikipedia for an explanation:

A bong (also known as a water pipe) is a filtration device generally used for smoking cannabis, tobacco, or other herbal substances.

Mr Morris is demonstrating its use pretty clearly in the photo. There is a large-diameter glass tube filled with water or other liquid, from which we can see him inhaling with vigor. In front of the glass tube, partly obscured by the forefinger of his right hand, is a stem loaded with cannabis. He appears to be holding a lighter in his left hand that he's using to ignite the cannabis in the stem, which in turn produces smoke that's drawn through the water in the tube and inhaled to give a euphoric effect. (But despite the Daily Mail's characterization that he "appeared relaxed", the wild-haired dude looks kinda like a hungry freak to me.)

Possession of small amounts of cannabis or marijuana for personal use is legal in California and some other states. According to writers like Alex Berenson, this has been a major public policy error, and I tend to agree. But just from watching police shows like On Patrol: Live, it appears that when people who are stopped and searched for drugs have marijuana, even in states where it's legal, they also carry other drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and fentanyl, which currently are illegal everywhere. This contributes to the impression that marijuana is a "gateway drug" that simply makes it easier to obtain and use more dangerous and illegal drugs.

This in turn leads to the perfectly reasonable question whether Mr Morris and Hunter used other drugs besides marijuana during their visit, but even if they didn't, this largely discredits the argument that Hunter has cleaned up his act and is living a life of sober respectability. If he were, it would be a major betrayal for Mr Morris to do anything that might encourage Hunter to relapse, like use drugs in his presence and in an environment where Hunter might also feel encouraged to use them. This in turn suggests that Hunter and Mr Morris mutually and cynically understand that the idea Hunter is clean and sober is for public consumption only.

But also, according to the Daily Mail link,

Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father.

Presumably Hunter is routinely tailed by paparazzi, who alerted to the black SUV and followed it to Mr Morris's place, where they got their photos and sold them to the Daily Mail. But we may surmise that the Secret Service waited around for Hunter to finish his "meeting" and drove him back to the Malibu compound or wherever else he was staying, so they must have observed just as much as the paparazzi did of Mr Morris and the bong. This in turn strongly suggests to me that the Secret Service is fully aware of Hunter's drug use and other lifestyle issues and effectively enables them -- which they've had a history of doing since Joe's time as vice president.

But finally, it's hard to avoid the impression that Mr Morris is not acting in his client's interest. According to the Daily Mail link above,

Morris is currently suing right wing nonprofit Marco Polo and its founder, former Donald Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler, who has been investigating the Biden family.

The attorney accused Ziegler and his nonprofit of harassment, invasion of privacy and 'criminal impersonation' in court documents filed in Los Angeles.

But Morris himself is acting in a way that damages Hunter's reputation, by portraying him as someone who is present when drugs are used -- and in fact, in the deal that Hunter agreed to for his firearm charge, for which Mr Morris was lead attorney,

Hunter Biden also has agreed to enter into a so-called pretrial diversion agreement in connection with a federal felony charge of possession of a gun by a person who is a user or addict of illegal drugs, according to the filing by prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Typically, such agreements call for the related criminal charge to be dismissed if a defendant complies with the conditions of the deal for a set period of time.

Those conditions would normally include abstaining from any drug or alcohol use -- but Mr Morris is by his own actions suggesting he won't encourage Hunter to take this seriously.

Well, prolonged cannabis use affects overall judgment. I disagree with the media accounts that call Kevin Morris a "legal heavyweight". He's just an entitled a stoner with more money than brains.

Maybe They Have A Point

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 from notes in his lap, but that didn't excuse his detached, offhand, garbled delivery.

Or take his Philadelphia speech yesterday:

“How many times you read in inflat—that a recession’s comin’?” Biden said in garbled fashion. “They’ven wall street today said no you’ll don’t say resheck comin’ now!”

I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that isn’t what it said on the teleprompter. . . . I tip my hat to the folks at the Townhall Twitter account for that translation because that certainly had to be a bit of a challenge.

The commentator goes on to wonder if Biden might even be having a stroke, but again, this needs a medical diagnosis that neither he nor I is qualified to give. I think a more likely explanation is suggested by this story from Politico on Tuesday:

President Joe Biden will make his longtime residence of Wilmington, Del., the headquarters of his 2024 campaign, he announced Tuesday.

“My family’s values, my eternal optimism and my unwavering belief in the American middle class as our nation’s backbone comes from my home — from Delaware,” Biden said in a statement.

Insofar as there's been comment about this at all, it's taken as an indication he expects to run the same sort of "front porch" campaign he ran in 2020, although even then, his actual campaign headquarters was in Philadelphia. It seems to me that given his character -- he's lazy, grandiose, and entitled (I don't need to be a medical professional to say this) -- this is a fully consistent strategy for him to take, and it's consistent with the attitude we saw in the recent public appearances I cited above.

As for his photo op with Isaac Herzog, it's indisputable that Herzog was there as a supplicant, and Biden's delivery and overall demeanor brutally reinforced this. Biden, after all, is the most powerful man in the world, he's fully aware of it, and dealing with supplicants, especially an Isreali supplicant, is an annoyance. His handlers have already made all the policy decisions, he's already signed whatever they've told him to sign, and his presence in the Oval Office is entirely pro forma. Get it over with, it's a big waste of time.

He reinforces this with a heavy-lidded lack of affect as he ostentatiusly gives a garbled reading from notes in his lap. He's neither sick nor senile, he's just incredibly bored. At his Philadelphia appearance, according to RedState,

After the story that broke over the past day about his staff having to make “accommodations” for his issues, Biden came trotting out, trying to look vigorous. But then he kind of blew that immediately, by then stopping suddenly, throwing his arms up, and telling someone up in one of the seats, “Don’t jump!” — that weird thing that he keeps doing.

As I've been saying all along, Biden sees himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations. With moves like that, he's simply flipping the bird to his own staff, who apparently urge him not to say all those dumb things. He'll say what he pleases, he'll do what he pleases, and he'll wander off the stage as he pleases, godammit. He'd just as soon be home in Wilmingon; this other stuff is a waste of his valuable time.

What may be bothering the Democrats who're trying to find a better candidate most isn't a possible medical condition, it's that Joe is conscious, aware of his environment, and making fully informed decisions based on his own appraisal, however cynical, of the political circumstances. As far as I can see, he doesn't think much has effectively changed since 2020, and he's simply going to repeat his 2020 stategy. I have a feeling that the Dunning-Kruger effect will be validated here, probably sooner than later.

I suppose if I were a Democrat strategist, I'd be nervous, too -- but what can they change?

Here's My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

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, a dealer or some intermediary left the baggie in a place where its intended recipient could find it, and the drop somehow went awry until the uniformed officers found it on a routine search that Sunday night.

But that theory goes only so far. According to ABC News reporting on the Secret Service briefing to Congress, Rep. Tim Burchett said the bag contained less than a gram of cocaine. But every indication we have is that Hunter has been a longtime addict, and he failed a drug test in the Navy as of October 2014.

Much more recent photos that I covered in this post appear to show Hunter snorting at public White House events. Both his long history with drugs and the apparent frequency of his use suggests he's a confirmed addict, and this means he needs much more than just a small bag containing less than a gram to get through the day. According to this site, "Though people use Cocaine at different rates depending on their addiction and tolerance to its effects, consistent users usually use up to 5 grams per day."

So a random dead drop of a single baggie doesn't seem reasonable for someone who likely needs as many as five of those baggies a day, or 35 a week. But if, as is generally speculated, Hunter is currently living at the White House, or at least is there pretty frequently, he would need a delivery system that's much more reliable and capable of supplying a much more significant amount. So on one hand, I don't think the baggie outside the Sit Room had anything to do with Hunter. On the other, we've got the question of how a much larger quantity must in fact be finding its way to him.

I'm surprised that nobody is probing Dan Bongino over this question. He can't be that naive about how much cocaine an addict like Hunter uses and how a single baggie in a dead drop won't suit the purpose. But at the same time, every indication we have is that Hunter indulges all his vices on an industrial scale, to the point that his Secret Service bodyguards must be fully aware of what he's up to, and that's got to be well beyond a baggie in a cubby now and then.

In fact, I don't see how the Secret Service Biden family detail can't be directly enabling Hunter's vices. But nobody's passing the word about this to Bongino? That just doesn't fit. Either Bongino is completely out of the loop, or he isn't telling the full story.

This brings me to yesterday's hearing at the House Oversight Committee, in which Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene discussed evidence showing Hunter purchased an airplane ticket for a supposed "paralegal" to travel to Los Angeles and back to have sex with him, paid for with law firm funds. (I believe this is the series of episodes from late 2018 and early 2019 covered in this story at the UK Daily Mail.)

This level of vice becomes an ingrained habit. The semi-official line is that once Hunter married Melissa Cohen in the spring of 2019, he got clean, changed his ways, and has become a model of filial respectability, but this is hard to believe, especially since he's so seldom seen with Melissa these days, especially in the White House, and this brings up the question of how he satisfies his other industrial-level vices and how this relates to his status as a Secret Service protectee.

According to the Secret Service website, protectees include the President and Vice President of the United States and their immediate families, which includes Hunter.

Permanent protectees, such as the president and vice president, have special agents permanently assigned to them. . . . Protection for the President and Vice President of the United States is mandatory. All other individuals entitled to our protection may decline security if they choose.

The protection of an individual is comprehensive and goes well beyond surrounding the individual with well-armed agents. As part of our mission of preventing an incident before it occurs, we rely on meticulous advance work and threat assessments to identify potential risks to protectees.

It isn't entirely clear whether Hunter can selectively decline security, but especially if he's in residence at the White House, we've got to assume the Secret Service is fully aware of whom he's seeing, where he's going, who's visiting, and what they're all up to. At least in 2018 and 2019, this included violation of federal law, the Mann Act. Whether or not Hunter was an official protectee at a given time, we know there appears to have been a Secret Service network throughout this period that was doing cleanup work over things like his wrecked rental car in Arizona (fall 2016) and the firearm in the Wilmington dumpster (October 2018). There's never been a satisfactory explanation for either of these episodes.

As far as I can see, the Secret Service has been aware of Hunter violating federal law while Joe was vice president, in the interregnum when Joe was out of office between 2017 and 2021, and as best we can infer, while he's president now -- and beyond that, not just aware of it, but enabling it. Somebody needs to get real and tell Bongino to put up or shut up.

Bp Barron's Favorite Television Show

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 one of my all-time favorites, Fringe, but I think there's one important difference. In Fringe, the FBI has established a special unit to investigate paranormal phenomena, in the course of which it is forced to spirit a disgraced Harvard professor who is a hybrid of Timothy Leary and Ted Kaczynski out of a mental institution to solve the scientific issues involved.

While there are tensions between Dr Walter Bishop and Supervisory Special Agent Phillip Broyles, briliantly played by the late Lance Reddick, Broyles is an experienced operator within the FBI bureaucracy, and he is able, despite Bishop's bizarre eccentricities, to work within the system to accomplish the overall goal of protecting society from paranormal threats. As such, the comedy's happy endings always reinforce the benignity of the established order, including the FBI and its corporate and political contollers.

The imaginative universe in Mrs Davis is of a different sort, much harder to characterize or clearly define. For starters, there is no ontological Satan, which is a product of the show's weird theology, which Bp Barron clearly understands. Sister Simone, the main character, consults with Jay, as well as the Virgin Mary, who is Jay's mother, but even for them, the universe is out of joint -- in one episode, Jay is preoccupied with fixing a leak that's flooding heaven, which he isn't quite able to control, but there doesn't seem to have been a war in heaven that might have caused it, nor an overriding plan that subordinates it in the scheme of things.

This is a fundamental difference between Mrs Davis and Fringe. Beyond science fiction comedy, I would call Mrs Davis neo-noir, which Fringe is not. It has more in common with the Jason Bourne trilogy, in which the CIA and other organs of state security have been deeply compromised, and Jason himself must undertake an inchoate hero's quest to defeat them and discover his own identity. As such, this fits the Wikipedia definition of neo-noir, "blurring of the lines between good and bad and right and wrong, and thematic motifs including revenge, paranoia, and alienation."

Why should something like this appeal to a generally middle-of-the-road, almost popularizing, Roman Catholic bishop, theologian, and evangelist, who indeed points out the major heterodox and syncretistic elements in the film? At the link, he explains, Mrs Davis is "a massively powerful internet algorithm, an artificial intelligence that basically knows all that can be known and that can order and manipulate human beings at will."

But Simone has intuited that Mrs. Davis, in point of fact, robs people of their independence, saps them of their energy and creativity, controls them ruthlessly, and finally dispenses with them when they no longer suit her purpose. She has come to see, to state it bluntly and simply, that the algorithm is an idol, a pathetic simulacrum of the true God, something that we have made that has come, like Frankenstein’s monster, to terrorize us.

There are gems throughout the film. Early on, Wiley, Simone's former boyfriend, realizes that Simone has allowed Mrs Davis to send her on a quest for the Holy Grail, which Simone nevertheless expects to use to destroy the algorithm. Wiley says basically, "She's sending you on a hero's quest. That's a cliche. Algorithms love cliches." In another sequence, a professsor, Dr Arthur Schrodinger, is annoyed by colleagues who keep giving him kitschy cat bric-a-brac. This sort of thing makes the film delicious, just as much as Fringe. There are extensive references to both Moby Dick and Jonah and the Whale, which sent me right back to Melville. What Bp Barron thinks redeems the film is this:

When the monks and hermits of late antiquity took to the hills, escaping from the dying civilization of Rome, respectable people thought they had lost their minds. Most of the denizens of the Mrs. Davis universe feel the same way about Sr. Simone and her community: Why would anyone want to operate outside the ambit of a force so benevolent? Could I make a suggestion? Take a look at your phone and find out how much screen time you put in last week, and then ask yourself honestly how much of your thinking and behavior was determined by that little machine.

I note via the Wikipedia link that it's been announced there won't be another season for Mrs Davis, so the story arc and the metaphorical structure are complete. It's now possible to order the full season on DVD via eBay, which is what I did. The film is worthwhile fun.

Back To The Center Of Attention

Via The Washington Examiner,

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer turned transgender activist Lia Thomas is back at the center of attention after the national champion was seen on social media appearing to embrace the "Trantifa" movement.

Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female, was seen on Instagram sporting an all-black outfit that included a BDSM leather harness and shirt reading "Antifa Super Soldier."

The image of Thomas was reportedly shared by the activist's partner Gwen Weiskopf, who purportedly identifies as transgender.

So who is Gwen Weiskopf? A quick web search brought up this photo and a writeup:

At the link:

[D]etails on Lia Thomas and Gwen Weiskopf’s relationship timeline & their dating history still need to be published in the public domain.

However, sources believe the couple is still together despite Lia’s name beginning to trend over the internet after participating in female swinging despite being transgender.

So by the accounts of the female swimmers on the Penn swim team, Lia is an intact biological male who claims to be "transgender", whatever that means, but is also conventionally attracted to women, and Ms Weiskopf appears to be an intact biological female, at least judging by facial features and the proportion of her hands. So I'm wondering if the whole Lia saga has been nothing more than an elaborate windup in the UK sense, an extended joke. If Ms Weiskopf claims to be "transgender" as well, then they amount to a conventionally cisgender couple who are just appropriating trans status for attention and privilege.

But this brought me to another question, now that notionally "trans" figures like Dylan Mulvaney and Sam Brinton have been in the public eye: can you make a career out of being trans? It looks like Lia is trying to rebrand himself as being more generally "transgressive", as opposed to just transsexual, posing as an “Antifa Super Solder” in bondage-style leather gear.

Sam Brinton has also been back in the news:

Sticky-fingered former Department of Energy employee Sam Brinton was on a taxpayer-funded work trip when they snatched a woman’s suitcase from a Las Vegas airport, documents obtained by The Post show.

Federal funds paid for non-binary Brinton, who uses they/them pronouns, to head to the city as a representative for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy in July 2022, according to internal expense reports provided to The Post by the federal watchdog Functional Government Initiative (FGI).

Although Brinton has a master's degree in the nuclear waste field, he built his working career largely on gay and trans activism within scientific fields, which culminated in his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, which lasted fully six months until his arrests for stealing luggage from airport carousels. During this period, he also had a side gig hosting spanking seminars at kink conferences, and it would appear that if his guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges for two prior thefts won't end his nuclear career, which requires a security clearance, pending felony charges for a third theft almost certainly will, and his future prospects are likely to involve headining kink conferences.

But this brings me to my favorite question: what problem are Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney trying to solve? They present themselves as trans activists, but they also stand for a principle that goes beyond just the problem of sexual preference -- and at least in the case of Lia Thomas, his day-to-day sexual preference is simply irrelevant. He identifies as trans even if he's apparently in a conventional long-term relationship with a woman and dates other women as well. This piece by radical feminist author Angela Saini explains the real issue:

I think the fight for transgender rights and non-binary rights is an anti-patriarchal fight, because gendered oppression flattens people and expects you to follow certain rules, which disadvantages everybody who doesn’t conform to that system. So we have to see it all as intrinsic. The anti-transgender movement in the US mainly is associated with religious conservatives, and that’s true in many other parts of the world, like Eastern Europe for example.

I find it bizarre that, in the UK, it’s associated with a certain section of feminists. I don’t know how that has happened. I really hope that we can reach a point at which we understand and accommodate the fact that we cannot wish people away. What happens at the administrative level and institutional level is a problem we have created because we’ve created our institutions in such a binary way. If we hadn’t created them in such a binary way we wouldn’t be in as much of a mess as we’re in right now. What you have to ultimately accept is that space needs to be made for everyone. We need to make everyone feel comfortable and safe in society – and surely that’s something we can all get behind.

The problem is that guys wearing lipstick and dresses or swimming on the women's team turn out to be just a totem for the bigger issue, which is the need to eliminate "certain rules" that "flatten people". The rules extend beyond conventional gender roles to questions like traditional respect for the rule of law, the role of logic and grammar in clear expression, or even the use of mathematics as a broad tool for understanding the everyday environment. Eliminating principles like these, which basically comprise "natural law", is the object of "smashing the patriarchy".

My question about people like Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney is how they can support themselves under the general principles of natural law -- they have to live out a normal lifespan and earn a living that will keep them comfortable. Leaving everything else aside, they're going to get old, and they're going to fade quickly from media. Can they cancel out that rule? I'm sure they'd like to. But things like Lia Thomas's phony claims of "trans" privilege are transparent. You can't cancel natural law, and to the extent that "patriarchy" is a reference to millennia of human experience about how the world runs, you can't smash it.