In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Two weeks ago, Jeff Bezos stepped into one of the biggest PR disasters you could imagine. Aaron Cohen, a PR and brand executive. wrote : Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin may have made history on Monday for sending an all-woman crew into sub-orbit on its New Shepard rocket ship for all the wrong reasons. From a pure PR perspective, this was a Jupiter-sized faceplant. . . . It reeks of poorly performed virtue signaling. Showing extremely privileged women taking a magical vacation into space as passengers while leaving common folk grinding away at their hamster wheel does not a good deed make. . . . It is difficult to imagine any PR team approving this launch without waving flaming red flags. But just yesterday, Amazon and Bezos stepped in it yet again : Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that, according to a source familiar with the matter, the e-commerce giant will start showing the figure added to the value because of the duties right alongside a product’s total pric...

Trump has bveen asking this question in various contexts lately, most recently over Taylor Swift . Of the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl win, he observed at the White House yesterday, “It was incredible. A little surprising,” the president said of the blowout win. “I was there along with Taylor Swift,” Trump added before asking rhetorically: “How did that one work out?” The “You Belong With Me” singer, who is in a high-profile relationship with star Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, was loudly booed — to her apparent surprise — when she was shown on the big screen during the game. Moments earlier, Trump was greeted with applause and cheers when he was shown during the pregame performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I've been wondering when Trump will address this question to J B Pritzker : Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday night, calling for “mass protests” and declaring that Republicans “cannot kn...

The @nytimes story on the January DC plane crash hides its takeaway until the last sentences: the lady helicopter pilot ignored multiple warnings from her right seat about altitude (and his directly telling her to turn away) and flew straight into a passenger jet. The end. Ugh. pic.twitter.com/7emtYkZTwQ — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 27, 2025 There's a new fuss over what seems to be a previously unreported excerpt from the cockpit recording of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines jet at Reagan National Airport on January 29. Three months on, new details published by The New York Times revealed that the pilot made more than one mistake leading to one of the worst catastrophes in aviation history. Not only was Lobach flying her Black Hawk too high, but in the final moments before the impact, she failed to take advice and instruction from her co-pilot to switch course. . . . Just 15 seconds before colliding with the commercial airpl...

An Atlantic piece, Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet , was linked on Real Clear Politics this morning. Its complaint: In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. And FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino spars with agents on the wrestling mats of Quantico. Kristi Noem is a particular target: Noem, who has earned herself several dismissive, Mattel-inspired nicknames—“Border Control Barbie,” “ICE Barbie”—is perhaps the most conspicuous offender. She has been photographed behind the controls of both a Coast Guard boat and a Coast Guard plane, donned a helmet and Border Patrol fa...

Alt media so far haan't been happy with either Attorney General Bondi or FBI Director Patel, accusing both of grandstanding on Fox News without making real progress on the Trump agenda. At the moment, Bondi’s position is much more politically precarious with the right, which might explain her omnipresence on Fox News and Fox Business programming, where she’s repeatedly turned to safely articulate her explanation for the Epstein files mishap — “Everything’s going to come out to the public,” she assured host Sean Hannity — and return to her preferred message of cleaning up the Biden era Justice Department and prosecuting violent crime. The same story suggests Trump is nevertheless happy with her: By all indications, Bondi’s position remains secure with President Donald Trump, who called her “fantastic” on Thursday and gave her a glowing review during a visit to the Justice Department Friday. The longer-term question is how much more patience and grace Trump’s b...

In posts like this one a few weeks ago , I've tried to trace the ecosystem by which the Biden administration brought in illegal migrants, not just by letting them through the border, but by recruiting them in their home countries, flying them to the US, settling them in designated communities, giving them quasi-legal protected status, and paying for their food, shelter, transportation, and medical care. What we still don't know much about is who designed this very complex system. We do know that a key part of it was roughly a dozen "faith based NGOs" that received billions in federal grants to implement the settlement program. Although they represented different denominations with different governing structures, they all appear to have operated in a similar way, settling migrants in specific cities and coordinating with for-profit sweatshop employers, slumlords, and car dealers. One nationality that keeps reappearing in these accounts is Venezuela. This is partly ...

I woke up this morning for some reason with the name Krafft-Ebing hangng in my thoughts like a tune that won't go away. I don't think I'd thought of that name in years. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), an Austrian psychiatrist, was a pioneer of the modern notion of sexuality, so in the context of recent events, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that he'd pop up that way. Let's just do a quick review of recent news stories. On Monday , Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Democratic aide best known for being filmed on the receiving end of a backdoor sex romp in a Senate hearing room in 2023, is finally speaking out about the scandal that cost him his job and prompted him to flee the country. The Washington Free Beacon exclusively reported in February that Maese-Czeropski had moved to Australia to launch a new career as an independent sex worker who posts pornographic photos and videos on the internet. This week the disgraced Democrat, who was a l...

I'm going back to Harvard, because as usual, the media, alt, legacy, or otherwise. is playing its annual game of extending spring break into Memorial Day, at which point they can check out for summer vacation. The two big stories this week are "Who will be the next pope?" and "Is Trump trying to ease Hegseth out?" which don't have answers and don't require mental effort -- and that comes after a weekend of evergreen bromides saying nice things about Easter. Things likely won't pick up until October. But I found a piece at the Harvard Crimson that illustrates how Ivy students are insidiously brainwashed into believing the system that's selected them is good because, after all, it selected them in a highly selective, meritoratic process. This is also at the heart of David Brooks's endorsement of the Ivies in Bobos in Paradise . The system is meritocratic because, after all, it selected David Brooks. Just look at him! The Ivy student bod...

In an illustration of Glenn Reynolds's thought processes, he posts a link to Matt Taibbi's substack , which is behind a paywall, that contains another link to a David Brooks column in the New York Times , which is also behind a paywall. All the Times will let me see beyond the paywall is Brooks's title, "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal." Anyone who's able to get past both paywalls just like that is probably subscribed to a good deal else besides The New York Times and Matt Taibbi's substack -- for starters, maybe The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, which means they're likely paying hundreds of dollars a year, or maybe expensing it, to get material that's not worth that kind of money. And at least it used to be blogger etiquette not to link to items behind paywalls. But that's Glenn Reynolds and Salem Media these days. Taibbi quotes a single paragraph from Brooks: We l...

Minnesota state employee Dylan Bryan Adams, 33, was allegedly caught on camera keying multiple Teslas. pic.twitter.com/s5GlRbkhqo — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 19, 2025 A week ago , I noted a pecullair demographic pattern among the great majority of perpetrators alleged to have damaged Tesla vehicles or sabotaged Tesla dealerships in protest of Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration, namely that they tend either to be members of the "bobo" managerial-professional class, or they tend to be transsexual or queer-identifying males. In that post, I cited one member of the 500 Queer Scientists organization and three prosperous members of the bourgeois bohemian class. A month ago, on March 21, I cited four trans-identifying males charged with arson against Tesla dealerships in Oregon, Colorado, and South Carolina. The bobos consistently vandalize individual Tesla vehicles, while the trans guys consistently set dealerships on fire. Three ne...

According to The Daily Beast , Harvard academics have warned they will be forced to euthanize animals used for medical research because of Donald Trump’s $2.2 billion funding freeze. This is disingenuous. According to this site, Animals are typically killed once an experiment is over so that their tissues and organs can be examined, although it is not unusual for animals to be used in multiple experiments over many years. If the lab animals are going to be euthanized no matter what, why the fuss? The answer is fairly clear, Harvard wants to portray the Trump administration as being cruel to animals, when the Harvard researchers are routinely cruel to animals no matter what, just as long as they get their money. Cutting off their money sounds like it would actually benefit future generations of lab animals. But this is an indication of how seriously Harvard takes the current threats from the Trump administration. On top of threats to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt...

I've noted here that a feature of Trump's strategy is to take away multiple legs of any stool on which a problem sits. The Harvard problem -- which is shorthand for the uber-endowed prestigious university problem in general -- sits on multiple stools, each with multiple legs. The international student problem is one of those stools, and Trump is busily taking away several legs of that stool. One leg of this stool is the cash cow that international students represent to US universities. According to Karin Fischer, who covers international education for the Chronicle of Higher Education , Typically, international students and out-of-state students pay more than students who go to college in their own home states, sometimes two or three times as much. International students may also pay special fees for things like visa processing and English language exams. . . . about 80% of international students pay their own way, whether from their own families or by borrowing mo...