The UK Henry Nowak Scandal, The Sloppy Reporting, And The Real Issues

For those who haven't been following the story, here are the basics of the Henry Nowak murder case, from Wikipedia:

On 3 December 2025, Henry Nowak, an 18‑year‑old British university student, was murdered by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old British Sikh man, in Southampton, England. Digwa stabbed Nowak five times with a Sikh dagger [but see below], including a fatal wound to the chest. When police officers from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary arrived, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of assault. Police body camera shows that Nowak repeatedly told the officers that he had been stabbed and pleaded that "I can't breathe," as the police handcuffed him. Nowak died shortly after being handcuffed.

There's been a great deal of sloppy reporting on both sides of the pond, especially regarding the knife Digwa used, which is shown in the police photo above. Even the Wall Street Journal gets this wrong:

This week, Digwa was sentenced to life in prison for murdering Nowak with a knife he carried as part of his Sikh faith. . .

Elsewhere, this knife is described as a kirpan. According to Wikipedia,

The kirpan . . . is a blade that Khalsa Sikhs are required to wear as part of their religious uniform, as prescribed by the Sikh Code of Conduct. Traditionally, the kirpan was a full-sized talwar at around 76 cm long (30 in); however, British colonial policies and laws introduced in the 19th century reduced the length of the blade, and in the modern day, the kirpan is typically a dagger between 12 and 30 cm long (5–12 in). According to the Sikh Code of Conduct, "The length of the sword to be worn is not prescribed", but must be curved and single edged (as its original sword form was), and worn over the right shoulder and across the body.

So an actual kirpan, unlike the knife in the police photo above, is shorter, single-edged, and curved:

Acccording to the BBC,

The Sikh Federation said the blade used by Digwa was not a religious knife, known as a kirpan.

It has condemned the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for not making this clear during the trial, telling the BBC the community has been "demonised".

The CPS said that Digwa chose to carry two ceremonial knives and that the judge's finding of fact made clear that he agreed with its assessment that this was a kirpan that Digwa chose to use.

According to The Telegraph (behind a paywall), Digwa wasn't a very good Sikh. He had already been banned from his temple for stealing £1,000 worth of kirpans from the temple in 2023. According to the BBC,

Following Thursday's verdict, the UK Sikh Federation said in a statement: "Fully practising Sikhs who wear a Kirpan should continue to recognise the serious responsibility that accompanies it, together with the limited legal protection that exists for wearing it for genuine religious purposes."

The federation said it believed the large blade used by Digwa "was not the normal Kirpan worn by fully practising Sikhs".

"That's what we wanted to clarify - that actually the perpetrator used an item which can only be called an offensive weapon," it added.

I've got to say I'm on the Sikhs' side here. Good Sikhs are good citizens; there's a Sikh temple only a few blocks from us, and it's part of the community. This guy was definitely not a good Sikh; this is an issue entirely of UK immigration, social, and law enforcement policy, not the Sikh religion. Nigel Farage lays it out clearly:

That barbarous act was bad enough. But what compounded the horror, and shocked so many of us to the core, was the behaviour of the police officers who subsequently arrived on the scene.

Because that help, when it came, was not what young Henry expected.

Far from assisting the dying teenager, the police’s focus from beginning to end was on the allegation made by the assailant’s brother that they had been “attacked and racially abused by a white guy”. In other words, an accusation of a racial slur was treated more seriously than an act of murder.

Henry was handcuffed as he lay bleeding. He died on the pavement. The last words he heard on this earth were not ones of comfort or calming reassurance, but of those police officers coldly reading him his rights. Those images are impossible to watch without feeling a profound sense of anger.

While the incident had to be reported to the Independent Office of Police Conduct, and the local agency did this the day after the murder, the IOPC statement is hardly reassuring:

“Our thoughts and sympathies remain with everyone affected by Henry Nowak’s tragic death.

"Our independent investigation into the contact Hampshire and Isle of Wight officers had with Mr Nowak immediately prior to his death on 4 December, including the use of handcuffs by officers and the first aid provided, remains ongoing.

“Our investigation began following a mandatory referral from the force, which we received the same day.

“We acknowledge that this case has raised questions about the actions of the attending officers and we are aware that a few minutes of police body worn footage has been issued by the force following the conclusion of criminal proceedings.

“As part of our ongoing investigation we are reviewing a large amount of police body worn footage, which we need to consider in context with other evidence we have obtained, including reviewing material presented during the murder trial, as we establish the full circumstances. . ."

In other words, this will be slow-walked until the furor dies down and they can whitewash the whole episode. According to the UK Guardian,

The Guardian understands the IOPC has found no indication of any disciplinary or criminal offence by the officers involved after six months of inquiries, after it was referred to the watchdog in December. Hampshire police said of four officers involved, three remained on full duties and one has resigned.

But the officers handcuffed the dying victim but never handcuffed the perp at all. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What would be policy in the US for officers, as in the Nowak case, handcuffing the victim while never handcuffing Digwa?" It answered,

If American law enforcement officers responded to a scene like the Henry Nowak case—where a severely injured person was handcuffed while the actual attacker (Vickrum Digwa) was left unrestrained due to a deceptive narrative—the officers’ actions would face severe scrutiny under several major U.S. policing policies and legal standards.

. . . When an individual states they cannot breathe or have been stabbed, U.S. officers are legally and contractually required to assess the medical emergency immediately. Handcuffing a prone, heavily bleeding victim worsens positional asphyxia and delays trauma care.

Dismissing statements like "I've been stabbed" or "I can't breathe" to prioritize an arrest for a misdemeanor assault allegation violates standard First Aid/First Responder protocols taught in American police academies.

. . . Handcuffing a person who is slipping out of consciousness, unable to stand, and drowning in their own blood fails the "objectively reasonable" test. The physical state of the individual proves they pose zero immediate threat and are incapable of resisting.

. . . Leaving Digwa completely unrestrained while he is close to a critically injured person violates basic officer safety and scene control protocols. Even if officers initially believed Digwa's claim of being a victim, standard U.S. procedure dictates frisking or securing both individuals temporarily to search for weapons if a violent altercation was openly admitted.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, if U.S. officers take a person into custody (by handcuffing them), they assume a legal duty of care for that person’s safety and well-being.

In the U.S., acting with such severe negligence would strip officers of qualified immunity, exposing them and their municipality to catastrophic civil rights lawsuits under 42 U.S. Code § 1983.

Had this specific tragedy occurred under U.S. jurisdiction, standard accountability protocols would immediately trigger:

1. An Internal Affairs (IA) or independent state-level investigation for a critical use-of-force/in-custody death.

2. Immediate termination of the officers for violating the department's mandatory Duty to Intervene and Medical Aid policies.

3. A presentation of the case to a grand jury by local or federal prosecutors for potential charges of reckless endangerment or manslaughter.

So far, reporting, especially on the US side, hasn't taken any note of the stark differences between what's apparently expected of UK police and US police, nor the extent to which US Constitutional guarantees would prevent a Nowak-equivalent situation from occurring, or if it did, how quickly severe penalties would accrue both to the officers and later, via the civil system, to the agencies involved.

One of the four officers involved was allowed to resign in the immediate wake of Nowak's death, and this has only sharpened suspicion about how the case is being handled:

Henry’s father Mark Nowak, speaking after Digwa was sentenced on Monday, said that officers involved in the case are still on duty, and one was allowed to resign before they had given a full account to the IOPC.

He said: “We believe the officers involved remain on duty although we understand some may since have resigned. One was allowed to leave the force before she had given an account to the Independent Office of Police Conduct of what happened that evening.”

It is understood that the officer who resigned in January was not one of the two who arrived first at the scene. They provided an initial account to the IOPC but have not given a more detailed statement. The other officers involved have all given full accounts.

Comparing the treatment of his son with that of his killer, Mr Nowak told journalists: “His murderer, however, was afforded decency. He was believed. He was not handcuffed when arrested. He was not handcuffed when transported to the police station. As far as we understand, he was never handcuffed at all.

There have been protests in Southampton:

A large group of more than 1,000 protesters marched through Southampton's city centre towards the scene of the crime on Tuesday, local time, and attacked police blocking the road with stones, bottles and bins.

Some members of the rally who gathered outside the city's main police station were heard chanting "two-tier scum" and "shame on you!" while waving British Union Jack and England flags, AFP reported.

. . . Protesters, some wearing masks, then marched to the residential area where the crime took place and attacked a line of police wearing helmets and carrying riot shields, chanting "scum".

American tech tycoon Elon Musk has posted on X an offer to fund a private prosecution against the police over their handling of the murder.

The police response was unhelpful:

British police officers kicks a Henry Nowak protester as he’s pinned down on the ground by several other officers pic.twitter.com/TjaaLauPZQ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) June 2, 2026

Nigel Farage continues at the link:

For many people, this case reinforces a growing perception that Britain now operates according to a two-tier culture, where some groups receive greater protection than others. Make no mistake, this is not a perception that emerged overnight. It is the product of decades of political choices.

. . . The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson recently revealed an email from an experienced Hampshire police officer. According to his account, officers are encouraged to respond differently depending on the ethnic backgrounds of those involved. The same officer described a culture in which promotion was influenced by diversity targets rather than merit alone.

If such claims are true, they should concern every citizen, regardless of political persuasion.

Policing depends on public confidence. The public must believe that officers enforce the law fairly and without fear or favour. The moment people begin to suspect that race, religion or background affect how they are treated, trust begins to erode.

Later, Farage went farther:

Appearing via a live stream from a location with fields in the background, Nigel Farage paid tribute to the “extraordinarily dignified” response of the Nowak family, before wading in with remarks of his own.

“I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage,” Farage said.

He went on to link the case of Nowak – handcuffed by police after being fatally stabbed by a Sikh man who claimed the student had racially abused him – to “anti-white prejudice” and call for the “promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black lives”.

My own takeaway from this case is that the comfortable platitudes we hear about similar US and UK cultural and legal traditions are simply false. The unwritten UK "constitution" provides nothing like the protections US citizens receive just in the daily course of contact with law enforcement. I'm more and more inclined to agree with Farage that "pure cold rage" is called for, except it seems like we took care of that ourselves in 1776.

So far, though, nobody seems to be noticing the enormous differences between the US and UK constitutional and political systems and the poor treatment they afford to ordinary UK citizens.

Epstein's Trump Connections Were A Nothingburger -- Bill Gates Is Something Else

Every time a rich guy messes up his PR, I keep going back to Ivy Lee (1877-1934), the inventor of the field, who said, "Tell the truth, because sooner or later the public will find out anyway." He's credited with rehabilitating the Rockefeller family's reputation after thr publication of the muckraking History of the Standard Oil Company and the 1913-14 Colorado miners' strike, which culmnated in the Ludlow Massacre. (I've always thought Ida Tarbell's characterization of Rockefeller Sr is second only to Milton's Satan in Pardise Lost.)

But to the Rockefellers' credit, Lee had to have something to work with. If they followed his advice and told the truth, after all, there had to be something good to tell the truth about. Sonehow, even if Ivy Lee were still around, Bill Gates wouldn't have been such a successful client. A Wall Street Journal piece reports Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking.

Bill Gates’s employees have spent years carefully cultivating his image—down to keeping a custom-size mannequin to test his outfits for different days of the week.

A styling group stores troves of neutral tone crew and V-neck sweaters, button-down shirts, slacks and extra pairs of the Silver Lining Opticians “Carbon” glasses at an off-site building, current and former employees said. Once options are selected for public-facing engagements, employees usually send three options for approval by senior staff. The goal: to depict someone calm and approachable, like Mister Rogers.

But even if you're rich, your staff can do only so much. In the 1990s, he visited a tech company I worked for, and although his button-down collar was buttoned, one one side, his tie came down outside the button. His personal life overall seems to have been something like that -- maybe it still is:

His carefully crafted image has been shattered as more details of Gates’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein have spilled into public view, challenging prior efforts by the 70-year-old to downplay his relationship with the sex offender. In a February town hall with foundation employees, Gates owned up to two affairs with Russian women referenced in Epstein’s emails.

Some people familiar with the matter said they heard about his admission to staff with disbelief: In his divorce proceedings, allegations related to more than 20 affairs had come up.

His relationships with employees at both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation appear to have been complex and incestuous:

Now, several women have reported that Gates engaged in inappropriate sexual misconduct or sexual advances over the past few decades while he was married. He allegedly made sexual advances and pursued sexual relations with women who worked for him at Microsoft and at his philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Specifically, in 2019, Microsoft’s board of director, on which Gates sat at the time, opened an investigation into one of the claims after it received notice that Gates had pursued an “intimate relationship” with an employee back in 2000.

Gates was also accused of having a multi-year romantic relationship with one of the company’s female engineers. After the allegations, Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board, but continues to serve as a technology adviser at the company. His spokespeople say that this decision did not relate to the alleged affair.

Melanie Walker, an Epstein protegee whom he initially recruited by claiming he could get her work as a lingerie model for Victoria's Secret, later served both as his "science adviser" and a date for then-Prince Andrew, and still later worked for the Gates Foundation and served as a back-channel interface between Gates and Epstein. At the same time, she began a relationship with Steven Sinofsky, who had become a technical assistant to Gates. She later moved in with him, continuing a close connection between the Epstein and Gates worlds. The WSJ continues,

Justice Department files show that Gates met with Epstein multiple times despite concerns from his then-wife, that Epstein knew about some of Gates’s extramarital relationships and that two of Gates’s close advisers had exchanged hundreds of messages with Epstein for years up until 2019, the year he died. [One of these two was Melanie Walker, Sinofsky's live-in.]

Fallout from the revelations about Gates’s behavior is now eroding efforts to protect his reputation. Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was recently snubbed from the company’s annual CEO summit and from the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which he has attended for years.

Allegations of sexual misconduct continue to bubble up in connection with his business activities:

In early March, a House committee investigating the Epstein case sent letters to Gates and other high-profile Epstein associates seeking their testimony. The next week, Gates’s nuclear power company TerraPower was engaging in its own form of reputational damage control.

On March 9, TerraPower gave employees three days’ notice of a virtual all-hands meeting, without saying why, according to an internal document. Usually the company gives staff weeks’ notice.

During the meeting, CEO Chris Levesque reiterated Gates’s talking points. Levesque told employees to expect to hear more about Gates’s ties to Epstein in the coming months given the upcoming congressional questioning. He acknowledged receiving employee concerns through an anonymous program, managers and human resources on the matter, which he described as “troubling.” He also told staff that he had talked to Gates’s private office and “it is clear it doesn’t involve TerraPower.”

“There’s no connection to any TerraPower activities, even the two affairs that Bill had to share with the broader public, and his regrets on those, had nothing to do with TerraPower,” according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by the Journal. He encouraged employees to stay “mission-focused.”

Several current and former employees found that confusing—and privately talked to each other about how it wasn’t true. One of the women Gates had referred to having had an affair with—a “Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities,” he had said in his foundation town hall—was closely tied to TerraPower.

She worked at TerraPower from 2010 to 2012, according to her LinkedIn page, and her name was even in TerraPower’s internal system. She had been featured in a 2011 magazine article about her TerraPower work, including a photo shoot with Gates and TerraPower Vice Chair Nathan Myhrvold, a longtime Gates confidant.

What's beginning to come out is that Bill Gates doesn't seem ever to have been able to keep his trousers zipped, which his position as a person of wealth and influence facilitated -- but he also doesn't seem to have been able to keep that part of his life separate from his position of wealth and influence. Whatever Trump may or may not have done, he seems to have been much more successful at keeping things separate. This is going to come back and bite Gates, whOse judgment seems to be so poor that legions of staff can't protect him from it.

At The Very Minimum, Spencer Pratt Has Become A National Figure

The latest polls are an illuminating vignette. There were a few polls in March that had incumbent Kasren Bass at abouit 25%, Mamdani clone Nithya Raman at between 9% and 17%, and Spencer Pratt trailing in the low double digits. There were no polls in April. All of a sudden, the pollsters got interested, and there were four polls in May; the big change is Pratt. Three of the polls put him at 22%, while one, McLaughlin, puts him at 30%, leading Bass by one point. All four put Bass in the mid-to-high 20s, while most have Pratt leading Raman, who is between 19% and 20%.

The big difference between March and May is Pratt's momentum. The hurdle he has to overcome in the primary tomorrow is that he must finish in the top two and keep Bass from getting over 50%, in which case she would be elected mayor withut going to the November general election. This is his only possible strategy, since he himself doesn't have any serious chance of making 51% himself, at least as of now. But he's doubled his March numbers and put the race into a margin-of-error tie. Polymarket betting odds right now give an 84% chance that Pratt and Bass advance to a runoff.

So far, Pratt has been able to define the big issue in the race, which is homeless encampments. Raman and Bass are seen as either tacitly favoring the homeless outright, or supporting them de facto due to their weaponized incompetence. This seems to have done the most damage to Raman, whose numbers have improved since March, but not as much as Pratt's. Raman was trolled by constituents independently of the Pratt campaign for her inaction:

Socialist LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is getting hammered online after appearing visibly rattled by a staged homeless encampment protest outside her own home.

“I’m glad my kids didn’t have to see that,” Raman told comedian [sic] Adam Conover on his podcast released Wednesday before adding, “I thought this campaign was going to be about bike lanes and transportation.”

Raman was referring to a staged Memorial Day protest outside Raman’s Silver Lake-area home.

Footage from the stunt shows homeless people climbing out of tents, staging an open-air barbecue and one individual walking around carrying a bucket as neighbors recorded the scene.

The podcast was quickly shared on online with comment exploding because Raman has spent years defending homeless encampments near schools, parks and neighborhoods across Los Angeles while opposing tougher enforcement restrictions.

Critics immediately accused the Democratic Socialist councilmember of showing a stunning lack of self-awareness as families across Los Angeles continue dealing with encampments outside homes, playgrounds and schools.

Yup, she was going to campaign on bike lanes and transportation. Pratt singlehandedly changed the issues in the campaign with the innovative ads he's run since March. Media has begun to find him an appealing figure; as the YouTube embedded above shows, he was on Gutfeld Friday night bantering about Jill Biden and Joe's debate performance. Bill Maher has given him a not-quite endorsement:

CNN's Harry Enten says Pratt has a shot at winning, and Mark Halperin, who's been a Pratt fan all along, agrees:

Peachy Keenan at The Spectator says, Get ready for a Spencer Pratt Summer: He can win. Mark Halperin's more recent take is at best outside the box:

Guys, I have a new theory of the race . . . we looked at the poll yesterday [May 30] that showed the three candidates all bunched up. . . . Here's my new prediction: Bass is not gonna make the runoff. And if it's Spencer Pratt against a socialist, he's gonna win.

His interlocutor replies,

But you remember, it's ironic this is happening in LA. You remember the Bradley effect? Remember about Mayor Tom Bradley?

Actually, his own memory is fuzzy. Tom Bradley was LA's first African-American mayor, in office from 1973 to 1993. He never lost a mayoral election, However, according to Wikipedia,

Bradley ran to be the first black Governor of any state since Reconstruction in 1982 and 1986 but was defeated both times by Republican candidate George Deukmejian. Bradley's narrow and unexpected 1982 loss was at odds with the polls and was attributed to the racist vote, giving rise to the political term "the Bradley effect".

Again, according to Wikipedia,

The Bradley effect, less commonly known as the Wilder effect, is a theory concerning observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some United States government elections where a white and a non-white candidate run against each other. The theory proposes that some white voters who intend to vote for the white candidate will nonetheless tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for the non-white candidate. It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to California attorney general George Deukmejian, an Armenian-American, despite Bradley's being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.

It might also be called the "truth-teller effect" if it applies to Donald Trump or, potentially, to Spencer Pratt. Trump won the 2016 presidential election in spite of the polls and also outperformed the polls in 2024 because he ran on uncomfortable truths regarding DEI and immigration. People are less likely to tell pollsters they support the "truthteller's" position on the uncomfortable truths.

I don't think Mark Halperin's prediction will turn out, but I do go along with Polymarket's prediction that the two top candidates in tomorrow's election will turn out to be Bass and Pratt. But if it turns out to be Pratt and Raman, Pratt's strategy will be the same: he'll campaign against drugs, homeless encampments, and his opponent's open or tacit support of both.

What Pratt has going for him is that he's natural and sincere in front of the camera, he has a quick wit, and he's telegenic, which got him on Gutfeld. His momentum since February has come from the combination of these qualities with the truthtelling on issues. It doesn't hurt at all that some very talented people have donated extremely effective ads to his campaign, and this is likely to continue. His performance in then one debatge before the primary suggests he'll do well if there's another, but Bass did so poorly in that same debate that she may try to avoid another.

But what if he's elected? Remember that only one City Council member, Traci Park, is aligned with Pratt's program; many of the other 14 are likely to oppose him bitterly. Pratt will need to use the attractive persona he's built to rally the public directly to have much chance in implementing his program.

But the past few weeks have begun to bring me around to the view that he at least has a chance of winning -- even if he loses, he's established himself as a national figure. What might he do then?

UPDATE: Bill Maher, "Just keep doin' what you're doin'."

💥NEW: Bill Maher to Spencer Pratt👏

“You had me at hello … You have the exact right impatience with this sh*t. It’s very authentic … It’s good. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” pic.twitter.com/CHo5oxK3rx

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) June 1, 2026

A Glimpse Into The Disney Brain

The failure of Disney's latest Star Wars chapter, The Mandalorian and Grogu, has been a big story for weeks. For instance,

The last time a Star Wars movie under Disney ownership registered a low opening, it was 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story with an $84M 3-day, $103M 4-day and $153M WW (in like for likes). We bashed that result. The ambitious Star Wars expansion pic’s ticket sales were impacted by behind-the-scenes drama, in addition to the fact that Alden Ehrenreich was no Harrison Ford.

Now, Disney’s latest Lucasfilm title, this weekend’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is opening lower with $81M 3-day and 4-day $98M U.S., lower than Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s domestic start. Global is at $167M WW with $69M from 51 offshore territories. The movie was made under the previous Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, but it’s executive produced and co-written by Dave Filoni, who is the new co-Lucasfilm Head.

Even worse, just this past week,

The Mandalorian and Grogu has been toppled from the No. 1 spot at the domestic box office... by an R-rated indie horror film with a budget of less than $1 million.

Curry Barker's Obsession has proven to be a huge hit with cinemagoers since it hit theatres on May 15, and as it heads into its third weekend of release, the movie has reclaimed the No. 1 position from the first Star Wars feature since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker.

This isn't good news for Disney, and especially not good news for its new CEO, Josh D'Amaro, who's only a few months into that job. He recently felt the need to defend the film, but oddly, the only reference i've been able to find is in the YouTube video embedded above -- I've searched in vain for online text, and as a result, I've had to transcribe the words of the statement from what Mike Zeroh quotes in the video:

From our pespective, examining and analyzing this massive property like Star Wars, I thik it's very fair to say that there's this obsession with one side of the fan base that are politically motivated to financially halt the success of a prioperty as big as Star Wars. And so, when youi look at The Mandalorian and Grogu, I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of those in this fandom that they're afraid of change and afraid of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As CEO, it is my abdolute responsibility to make sure that we keep DEI at the forefront, and we are doing this with many of our upcoming projects.

But looking at the critics who suddenly changed their tune, and we are talking actual critics, I think the problem with this administration is that they have actually influenced the media in a very different way, and we are talking actual critics. I think the problem with this is that we are witnessing a cultural shift, and not for the better, where critics are afraid to express themselves. It just seems to me that the media right now is suppressed, and that goes for all journalists out there, even when it comes down to those reviewing major motion pictures, and we saw that impact our latest Star Wars film release.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is our greatest Star Wars film yet, and I could even go as far as to say that we did a better job than some of our previous films under Bob Iger. So our goal is to perhaps focus on smaller scale and less financially buerdened Star Wars films.

Except that Mike Zeroh in his own commentary simply sums up the critics' consensus, that the film already comes off as a low-budget attempt to turn out episodes from a TV series, not theatrical cinema, which Star Wars always was until Disney got hold of it. He goes on to quote D'Amaro later in the statement,

. . . this administration, without a doubt, has damaged our industry and damaged the media. It's something that we have to find a way to recover from. Journalists in the media need to actually gain back the courage to speak freely about a film when they really like something. And again, we have no plans on stopping our goals with DEI and just how important diversity and inclusion really is for our industry and for our movies and our properties here at the Disney company.

Zeroh goes on to say that in fact, there's very little DEI in The Mandalorian and Grogu, the problem is that it's dull and predictable. But DEI has been part of Josh D'Amaro's brand at Disney; in 2021, as head of Disney's parks, he liberalized dress and appearance standards for cast members at the parks:

For all the little boys who wanted to be princesses and the girls who wanted to be heroes and everyone in between, Disney is “A Place Where Everyone is Welcome” — at least it’s trying to be.

Ahead of their theme parks’ planned reopening, Disney announced a new addition to “The Four Keys,” the casts’ long standing tradition of honoring safety, courtesy, show and efficiency: inclusion. As part of their renewed efforts, cast members will be allowed “greater flexibility with respect to forms of personal expression,” including gender-inclusive hairstyles, jewelry, nail styles, costume choices and even tattoos.

“There’s more to do, but we’re committed to listening, learning and making meaningful improvements. The world is changing, and we will change with it, and continue to be a source of joy and inspiration for all the world,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, in a blog post.

Buit this wasn't D'Amaro's only innovation. At the same time, the parks imcreased prices to favor an upscale market:

Disney’s price strategy now positions them as a premium priced product. The company realizes many families simply cannot afford the price of admission. And, they accept this fact. On the other hand, plenty of people happily pay for the Magic Kingdom experience. They know their ideal client.

Their customers, known as guests, expect a memorable experience. Although their prices steadily rise, customers continue to walk through their gates.

Disney’s often the price leader. They raise their admission prices. Then all the other local theme parks follow their lead.

Currently adult tickets on peak days max out at $149. Those rates aren’t scaring their customers away. Since 2015, Disney’s revenue increased by $4.1 billion. I’m sure the stock holders are very happy.

The problem for Disney at this point is that the world is continuing to change. D'Amaro clearly blames criticism of the Disney product on the Trump administration. but Trump was voted in by the American electorate, in part because they didn't want drag shows at Army bases. D'Amaro represents a world view that's fading into the rear view mirror, but he insists that what Hollywood needs to do is force the culture back into the Obama-Biden years, while the culture clearly wants to move on.

So at this point, the Disney business plan appears to be to shut the public up and convince them instead just to pay more and more for a debased product. We'll see soon enough how that works out, but that was never Walt Disney's idea of how to make money.

Elon Musk OnThe Value Of College Education

Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial.

Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise.

Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”

For a thousand years,… pic.twitter.com/F5FS6lzlts

— Shadow Intel (@TheShadowIntelX) May 22, 2026

Toward the end of my time as a graduate assistant -- more than 50 years ago, in fact -- the whole purpose of a four-year degree began to clear up for me. Those of us who were teaching freshman comp were acutely aware of how many of the papers we got were plagiarized, and it must have been not too far from 100%. The students were going through the motions of submitting them, we were going through the motions of grading them, and everyone expected an A.

I finally got so fed up that I found an obvious case, and I started the formal process of bringing the student up on honors-code violations. This caused a major problem, such that my faculty adviser got involved. (He was actually schtupping my graduate-assistant girlfriend as well, but that's a whole separate matter.) He got all sanctimonious and insisted that "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" was the standard. I really couldn't go against him, except that I had the text the student had cribbed right in front of me, but he claimed that wasn't enough.

Actually, the standard of proof almost universally used in academic environments is "more likely than not", as explained in this University of Alberta policy:

Unlike the criminal system which must meet a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof, . . . the Code is based in Administrative Law, which lowers the requirement for proof. . . . Balance of probabilities is the “more likely (or probable) than not” standard. In other words, if the available evidence convinces the Dean to the point that he or she is 50% + 1 certain that a student has committed an offence, the standard of proof has been met.

But clearly any argument I made in that direction wasn't going to get anywhere. The problem was that I was going against the whole reason for college: an easay I linked in a post here not long ago puts it one way:

As the economist Bryan Caplan has observed, “The main function of education is not to teach useful skills (or even useless skills), but to certify students’ employability. By and large, the reason our customers are on campus is to credibly show, or ‘signal,’ their intelligence, work ethic, and sheer conformity.” As long as college remains a way for upwardly mobile kids to stand out from one another, and as long as employers believe that a better college degree is a sign of a better potential worker, the American university system should survive, even if teaching methods change.

Or more succinctly, the point of a degree is to qualify students for a certain level of white-collar job, but, contra the typical university mission statment, preparing students for responsible citizenship by fostering critical thinking, or something like that, is not what's on offer, those are just words. The point is to go through motions that more or less suggest something like that has taken place, when everyone pretty much recognizes it hasn't. The tweet above variously quotes and paraphrases Elon Musk:

Musk: “There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments.”

That is the product. Not intelligence. Not creativity. Not vision. Compliance.

You are paying $200,000 to prove you can tolerate bureaucracy on a schedule.

Musk: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.”

The entire system is a sorting machine for corporate HR. It does not measure what you can build. It measures whether you can sit still, follow directions, and deliver on command.

A number of the commenters to the tweet got quite hot under the collar:

I would prefer a surgeon with some institutional training, and a pilot and maybe a lawyer.

But surgeons and lawyers go to med school and law school for that training. A four-year degree has little to do with it. Even a pilot can't get hired with just a degree from Princeton or whatever; they have to have flown for the military or been to flight school. And for that matter, why do even med schools like Yale do DEI? That implies that even prestige professional degrees can be gamed.

And the four-year certificate of compliance quite frequently can be satisfied with everyone going through the motions. The English Department knows it's a popular major in some measure because the students recognize it won't just let them by if they plagiarize, it'll give then As. Why else would their parents pay $200,000?

Not only that, but the English Department is fully aware that if it became routine for instructors to bring students up on honors code violations, enrollment in its courses would quickly fall to something approaching zero, from which it would follow that faculty positions in the department would also quickly fall to something approaching zero.

That was the year it began to dawn on me that an academic career wasn't going to work out for me; no matter what I did, I'd just be going through the motions, and in fact, if I had a PhD on my resume, I'd be less employable in the real world than if I didn't have one. A real education might have made that clear to me much faster than the one I got.

Looking back, I recognize that what I should have done was try to find out how many plagiarism cases had ever gone through the system. It probably would have been something in single digits, notwithstanding everyone who taught freshman comp was fully aware that a huge proportion of freshman essays was cribbed. Actually, I wonder if any university has ever made a serious study of the size of the plagiarism problem and why it exists. I think that would raise too many basic questions about the system.

David Rush Built A High-Flying CIA Career On Pure Moonshine

A big story in yesterday's news was David Rush, characterized as a management-level CIA employee, but with no other specifics given, who was arrested last week with roughly $40 million in gold bars and currency that he's alleged to have embezzled from the agency. The New York Post asks the obvious question:

Ex-CIA officer David Rush’s alleged years-long scheme that netted him $40 million in gold bars and a top-secret security clearance has those in the Clandestine Service community questioning how he slipped through the fastidious vetting process — and who else may be flying under the radar.

Former CIA staff operations officer Tracy Walder was baffled over the stunning allegations against Rush and believes they could point to a much more troubling issue within the agency.

“This would have been a large-scale lying cover-up. There would have had to be a lot of other co-conspirators,” Walder told The Post.

Nevertheless, there have been other puzzling episodes that call the CIA's vetting and internal security measures into question. The YouTube embedded above is with former CIA employee and convicted leaker John Kiriakou, who worked for the agency from 1990 to 2004 and spent 30 months in federal prison from 2013 to 2015 for his role in disclosing the waterboarding of Al Qaida prisoners. In the interview, he describes his own vetting and hiring procedure, which seems to have been incredibly slipshod.

He was recruited for the CIA by one of his Georgetown professors, who apparently doubled as a talent spotter for the agency. He was sent to a non-descript suburban Virginia office building and told to meet someone named "Bob" there, although he says it's almost certain "Bob" wasn't his real name. After some perfunctory chat, "Bob" sent him on to another non-descript building:

So I go there, and there's a table with three chairs on one side and one chair on the other, and in the three chairs are three people who never identified themselves by name, but they identified themselvea as being a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and an anthropologist. So I sit down, no "Hello, how are you?" nothing. I sit down.

I said, "Hello," they all just kind of looked at me, and then one of them says, "Describe your relationship with your mother." And I said, "Yeah. My mom and I are close, she's a schoolteacher, she's a terrific mother, very nurturing, took good care of all three of us. . ." You know, what do you say?

And then thwy're like, "OK. Describe your relationship with your father." So I did. I said, "My dad's a good guy, he's kind of introverted, my mom was the extrovert of the family."

"Was your father the disciplinarian>" And I said, "No, actually, my dad's a big, strong guy, and I think he was always afraid he would hurt us or something, so no, my dad's a very gentle soul."

Then they asked me that question again [referring to the very brief initial interview with "Bob"], "Have you ever betrayed a friendship?" And I said, "I don't think so, let me think about it for a second," and then the anthropologist says, "No no, that's the answer we were looking for."

And then one of them says, "You need to go into the next room, and you need to give us some piss, some blood, and some hair." I go OK and gave him some piss, some blood, and some hair, and then I left.

I went home and I called my fiancee. She goes, "How did it go?" I said, "I have no idea. They asked me these three weird questions, it took 15 minutes, then they took my pee, my blood, and pulled some of my hairs out." I get a call like four weeks later from "Bob". He goes, "You blew the doors off that meeting!"

I go, "'Bob', it was like from Bizarro world, I didn't understand what they wanted, tbey wouldn't explain anything."

He said, "You aced it."

He describes a subsequwnt series of meetings at headquarters with similar innocuous questions and no feedback on his answers, followed by another call from "Bob", who tells him again, "You aced it!" The next step was a polygraph exam, which he describes as something of a charade, and which, as in the other meetings, he passed. And then he discovers that "Bob" was in fact the human resources director for the entire CIA.

My sense of things from this description is that, at least in Kiriakou's case, the whole process was "wired": the Georgetown University talent spotter had talked to "Bob", and the rest of the process was a foregone conclusion. But if that's the case, rightly or wrongly, if Kiriakou went to federal prison for violating espionage law, the vetting and hiring process hardly served the CIA's interest, although it certainly appears that Kiriakou had a clean record -- but the process nevertheless missed the possibility that he'd turn out to be a leaker, whatever his motives.

So this brings us to David Rush. According to Fox News,

A federal investigation revealed that despite holding a Senior Executive Service (SES) rank and Top Secret/SCI clearance, Rush routinely lied about his military background and education.

According to Wikipedia,

The Senior Executive Service (SES) is a position classification in the United States federal civil service equivalent to general officer or flag officer rank in the U.S. Armed Forces. It was created in 1979 when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 went into effect under President Jimmy Carter.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, the SES was designed to be a corps of executives selected for their leadership qualifications, serving in key positions just below the top presidential appointees as a link between them and the rest of the federal (civil service) workforce.

SES employees make between $150,000 and $225,000 per year. However, Rush appears to have reached this lofty state entirely on fumes. According to the Post link,

In applications for his high-level job, Rush claimed he was a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and the "current director of test for a 145-person, 18-aircraft joint Army/Navy weapons test organization," according to court documents.

However, military records show Rush was never a pilot and held no FAA licenses; his actual duties in the Navy included working as an information systems technician.

He also allegedly faked his educational credentials to boost his federal salary, claiming he held a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University and a master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, according to the filings.

. . . Further, the FBI claims that Rush scammed the government out of $77,000 in fraudulent military leave, claiming 744 hours of paid time off by telling his employer he was actively serving as a Navy Reserve captain (O-6) through September 2025.

Kiriakou's account of his vetting and interview process suggests that Rush must also have "aced" all his interviews and the polygraph, with nobody bothering to check his degrees or his current or prior employment. Not only that, but he was promoted throughout his 20-year CIA career on the same basis. Later in his interview, Kiriakou goes into the CIA's polygraph policy. Applicants get a pre-employment polygraph, one after three years, and then subsequent ones at five-year intervals.

He points out that a routine question at every exam is, "Have you ever committed a felony?" and the subjects are expected to answer truthfully. Somehow, David Rush was able to get through some number of polygraph exams while apparently embezzling multimillions, falsifying military leave, and who knows what else, without setting off any sort of alarm.

So the New York Post's questions at the first link strongly suggest David Rush isn't just one bad apple. Very little has been revealed about precisely what his job was, to whom he reported, and how he was able to requisition multimillions in gold bars that he could simply take home. According to another Post story,

When the agency conducted a routine audit, the assets were missing from official custody, prompting the CIA director to refer the matter to federal investigators.

“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the FBI said in a statement.

How did malfeasance at this level escape notice for so long? I suspect this is going to be covered up, but at least Ratcliffe finally took action -- still, what did his predecessors know?

Alien DNA?

It's too bad Pope Leo didn't take on space aliens in Magnifica Humanitas -- it's a question of technological misunderstanding not all that far from transhumanism, which he does discuss. But in any case, some crazy stuff has been coming out of the CIA lately, not least of which is the story of David Rush, the management-level spook who was busted with $40 million worth of gold bars in his home, which I'll likely get to tomorrow. But today, there's this:

The Central Intelligence Agency attempted to use genealogy database sites in its search for aliens, a whistleblower claims.

Dr. Jason Reza Jorjani told the “American Alchemy” podcast that Army veteran Lyn Buchanan informed him of an initiative in which the agency was exploring sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.

Buchanan claimed he was a spy with the CIA’s Remote Viewing Program.

“The CIA wants to hunt them down,” Jorjani stated, citing the program’s purpose of probing whether people could use extrasensory perception to conduct recon on distant objects, events or people.

The doctor acknowledged that Buchanan revealed to him that former CIA analyst Christopher “Kit” Green concocted a secret method to access both sites to screen users for a specific “genetic variance” linked to extraterrestrial beings.

Now, let's consider the prevailing paradigm of alien life, which is implicit in Fermi's paradox: there are X to the 27th Earth-like planets, and it follows that life could have evolved on a bodacious number of them, at least assuming that all you need to get life is some amino acids bubbling in puddles in such a way that they begin to reproduce or something. Fermi asked, of course, why we aren't seeing space aliens all the time if that's how it works, but we'll leave that aside for now.

The first problem I see with this CIA project to identify alien DNA is how they decided that life on other planets evolved to reproduce via DNA. The whole Darwinian evolutionary model says that life forms evolve via random mutation; something changes, and it either makes things better, and the fitter variant survives, or it makes things worse, and the less-fit variant dies off. How many gajillion tries did Mother Nature have to make, over how many bazillion years, to come up with DNA?

This method of genetic transmission, assuming it evolved in this random way, must be completely unique to what evolved on planet Earth. Let's say there's a planet Zohran on which some form of genetic transmission evolved, completely separate from Earth -- heck, go ahead and postulate X to the 27th Earth-like planets, and some form of genetic transmssion evolved separately on a bodacious number of them. What are the chances any two would involve anything remotely like DNA, much less be compatible enough that traits could be successfully transferred between organisms of the respective planets?

After all, creatures from Zohran might have 17 tentacle-like appendages and organs whose function we can't remotely imagine. Even if they have something close enough to DNA to be compatible with human DNA, how could you sort out the codes for the 17 tentacles and completely foreign organs to get anything like a viable fetus of either species? Even with DNA, only a very limited number of Earth species will successfully crossbreed.

Just for fun, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Would DNA be necessary for life to evolve on other planets?" It answered,

No, DNA itself is not strictly necessary for life to evolve on other planets, but an information-carrying molecule with similar properties is essential. Life requires a way to store, replicate, and pass down genetic instructions so natural selection can drive evolution. While Earth life settled on DNA, alternative molecular systems could fulfill this exact same role elsewhere in the universe.

The chemical architecture of alien life will largely depend on the solvent available on that planet. DNA and RNA work perfectly in water. However, if a planet features liquid methane seas (like Saturn's moon Titan) or liquid sulfuric acid, entirely different molecular structures—potentially utilizing silicon bonds instead of carbon—would be required to remain stable and functional,

But even this assumes some type of reproduction evolved on other planets that mirrors the two-parent genetic system that evolved on Earth. What if organisms on another planet just start to exist and modify themselves as needed without reproducing? If you can postulate that somehow life just started on Earth and almost immediately began reproducing to transmit genetic information, you can just as well postulate that organisms on Zohran just start to exist but don't need to reproduce, because they evolve internally and just keep living.

But because they don't die and don't reproduce, they don't transmit genetic information at all -- that's a primitive Earthling trait. So there's no way to crossbreed Earthlings with Zohranites. The assumption that you might is pure Earthling cultural bias. But there's more on space aliens in the latest news:

A small group of scientists have long suggested that the seeds of life may have been distributed across the vast distances of space via cosmic dust, asteroids, or comets — a theory known as panspermia.

. . . It’s an intriguing albeit far-fetched hypothesis that most recently caught the interest of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Following months of observations of mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which came surprisingly close to a number of solar system planets during its brief visit last year, Loeb proposed that it could’ve been shedding the building blocks of life during its journey — or even have been designed to seed planets like our own intentionally.

Well, that would explain why all the X to the 27th Earth-like planets had DNA, it was part of the original building blocks of life that were distributed to all of them on asteroids, but that just begs the question of how the building blocks of life that were distributed all over the universe got there in the first place. This makes my head hurt. It reminds me of our friend Judie, who likes the National Geographic TV show Ice Road Rescue, which she characterizes as tow truck drivers dedicated to saving people from their own stupidity.

But the question I still have is why the CIA was paying people to track down alien DNA, which is just a special case of the bigger question, how the CIA had a management-level guy who was able to requisition $40 million in gold bars that he stashed in his house. I'll maybe take this up tomorrow.