In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds posted this on Instapundit , linking to a substack essay by Alex Berenson , who is smarter, although I'm not always sure by how much. Berenson says, It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs from Morocco 4,000 miles east to Pakistan and south across Africa without realizing the importance of tribes. . . . What it shares more than anything is a commitment to tribe as the center of identity. In Arab and Muslim countries, cousin marriage helps sustain tribal identity; marriages between cousins account for two-thirds of all marriages in Pakistan and nearly as many in some Arab countries. Wait a moment. Let's rewrite the first sentence: "It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs 10,500 miles from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn in the pre-Colombian era without realizing the importance of tribes." This might sound appealing to Ivy Leaguers, but it's a meaningles...

🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable We ALL… pic.twitter.com/E3Penx2o7a — Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) December 26, 2025 Just yesterday, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer called for deportations and denaturalizations of Somali fraudsters : I have three words regarding Somalis who have committed fraud against American taxpayers: Send them home. If they’re here illegally, deport them immediately; if they’re naturalized citizens, revoke their citizenship and deport them quickly thereafter. If we need to change the law to do that, I will. Our nation will not tolerate those who take advantage of our charity and refuse to assimilate into our culture. But just like cameras are everywhere, the internet is forever. Via the Daily Caller, Minnesotans Beg...

This piece says more than intended about AI: A study conducted by Anaïs Galdin from Dartmouth and Jesse Silbert from Princeton analyzed cover letters for tens of thousands of job applications on Freelancer.com. The researchers discovered that after the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, the cover letters became longer and better-written. However, this improvement in quality led companies to place less emphasis on the cover letters, making it more difficult to identify qualified candidates from the applicant pool. Consequently, the hiring rate and average starting wage decreased. I've been out of the job market for some years, but I don't believe that, at least after I went into tech, I ever submitted a formal cover letter with my resume. I either mailed the resume in to the individual listed on the help wanted ad, or I e-mailed it, with at most a note saying something like, "I'm applying for the ___ job you advertised on Monster.com" or whatever other site...

I notice a piece in Politico, The Democratic Split Over Whether to Befriend AI — or Vilify It , that takes 2800 words to tell us that Demnocrats are split over AI. Well, everyone is split over AI, in part because nobody seems to be able to tell us what AI is. I think what's generally meant falls within the category of "generative AI", which creates "new" content using a combination of natural language processing and massive data search. For example, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Please write me a 500-word report on George Washington". It answered, in part, George Washington (1732–1799) was the foundational figure of the United States, serving as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and as the nation’s first president. His leadership style, defined by a commitment to republicanism and the voluntary relinquishing of power, set the precedents for the American executive branch. Military Leadership and the ...

I'm convinced that Victor Davis Hanson is actually an AI bot, but the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit are linking to his latest essay, Pseudo-Recessions : As the 1992 campaign approached, incumbent president George H.W. Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection. The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular U.S. victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses. For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90 and 70 percent. By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the favorite Democratic nominee. But he was written off as having little chance to knock off the popular Republican incumbent president with far more foreign affairs experience. Bush, however, had just lost his brilliant 1988 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to cancer. And third-party prairie-fire candidate Ross Perot had entered the race, drawing off conservative Bush support. I'm even older than...

A week ago, I linked to YouTube testimony from a disaffected Brown student , Alex Shieh, who pointed out that applicants from designated prep schools that act as Ivy "feeders" have a big advantage over other applicants, and that the Ivy system is effectively designed around the wealthy and the upper bourgeoisie, whose offspring attend these schools. This simply repeats an observation about the Ivies that's become commonplace. Then, earlier this week, I began to wonder if the Brown shooting rampage would affect Brown's standing in the US News college rankings. That in turn reminded me that Brown has traditionally been regarded as at the bottom of the Ivies. Chrome AI mode says, "In the mid-20th century, Brown was sometimes viewed as a 'poor relation' or 'on the fringe' compared to the older, more established social prestige of the 'Big Three'". However, this has changed: The bottom of the Ivies is now Dartmouth, which tied with B...

🚨 BREAKING: Brown University just put its police chief on LEAVE after the emergency response was horrifically BOTCHED, letting the shooter get away and kill an MIT professor Trump administration is also INVESTIGATING. BROWN MUST CLEAN HOUSE! Don't stop with him! This was a… pic.twitter.com/RDAn66pvdy — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 23, 2025 Continuing the trend, most of the aggregators haven't picked this up. Via the UK Daily Mail , University officials announced Monday that Rodney Chatman, the head of public safety at the school, was placed on leave effective immediately, and his day-to-day responsibilities were given to former Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements. The decision comes amid intense scrutiny over the school's security policies in the wake of the December 13 mass shooting, during which students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov were tragically killed and nine others left with injuries. Remarkably, as I noted yesterday, Chatman had ...

I've been puzzled that so little attention has been paid to the Brown shooting in any media, mainstream or alt. This is partly because the holidays started on Columbus Day. Oddly, the only analysis or opinion that's run at all at Real Clear Politics was its link to a Conservative Treehouse piece that suggested Brown may have disabled its surveillance cameras at the behest of left-wing groups, which I discussed here , but so far, we've had no corroboration that this was or wasn't done. About the closest any media outlet has come to serious analysis of the issues surrounding the shooting is an interview over the weekend Fox did with its contributor Paul Mauro, who held policy-level positions with NYPD in a 23-year career. He touches on several key issues in the interview, embedded above. At 2:10, he begins: Brown University police leadership really has to own a lot of this. They really seem to have had no provisions in place for hardening that target. That was an o...

Via The New York Post : In 2021, Brown University allegedly refused to call Providence police after a caller claimed to have placed bombs throughout campus and was carrying an AR-15 gun, according to the Brown Daily Herald. The local K-9 unit was finally called an hour later — after the school’s public safety officers spoke up, according to the paper. But it took Brown another hour to send out an alert to students. One of the officers later claimed the university went as far as altering its officer’s report of the incident to remove mention of his concerns, and references to the delay. . . . So far in 2025, security officers have issued two votes of no confidence against the university’s police chief Rodney Chatman and the school’s department of public safety. A scathing October editorial in the Brown Daily Herald called the problems with the school’s security a “threat to public safety” and said the university was “failing in its obligation” to keep students safe. Mr Chat...

I found the video embedded above in my YouTube feed this morning. While it doesn't specifically note the circumstances, it appears to be the testimony of Alex Shieh. a former Brown undergraduate, before a House Judiciary subcommittee last June regarding rising tuition costs and institutional bloat at Brown. One of the first points he made has been borne out since the 1960s by Ferdinand Lundberg, Alan Dershowitz, and Jerome Karabel: I'm a legacy student at Brown. I went to a prep school that feeds to the Ivy League. My parents are doctors who can afford the $93,000 a year sticker price. In other words, I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for. . . . According to The New York Times, the median student's family makes over $200,000 a year. Half the student body comes from the top 5% of earners. Shieh appears to have dropped out of Brown since his testimony to form a corporate startup, and not long before his testimony, he barely avoided disciplinary action ...

The news that the Brown shooter, who also apparently killed MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro, has been identified as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente doesn't seem to have been well covered by any media. Resal Clear Politics has nothing on it this morning, nor was it in my Google news feed. This story from the New York Post is probably as thorough as any, but it leaves a great many questions unasked. In the clip embedded above, Brian Llenas, a Fox reporter, posed just two of those many possible questions to the Providence police chief: Why did it take a citizen to notice a suspicious person right next to Brown University and not the police? And also, how long was the vehicle parked where it was? Was it days, hours, minutes? The chief's answer reveals how poor his communication skills are -- he just replies in a heavy, almost comical barrio accent, "Some people are more interested than others", which still raises the question of why the police weren...

Real Clear Politics generally doesn't link to alt sites, especially those that tend to be conspiracy-theory, as Conservative Treehouse does. But this morning, it linked to a post there from yesterday, Did Brown University Disable Their CCTV Systems? As originally reported in August 2025, a group of far-left human rights advocates sent a letter to 150 U.S. colleges and universities asking them to disable the CCTV systems to protect “free expression and academic freedom across the country,” because “the Trump administration has launched an aggressive campaign against US academic institutions.” . . . The Brown University President and school officials have been giving ridiculous answers to questions about the 800 cameras on the campus and the fact that no current footage exists of the shooter walking around inside the campus or inside the buildings therein. The question is really a simple one. Did Brown University follow the requests of the hardline leftist groups wh...