In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Andy Ngo writes in The New York Post, The anti-ICE activists are an insurgency, not a protest movement : On Saturday, the Democratic Socialists of America celebrated hitting 100,000 members. Almost on cue, their footprint in organizing anti-ICE so-called “protests” continues to grow. But these are not protests. They are coordinated obstruction campaigns modeled on the playbook of revolutionary insurgency inspired by violent revolutions. That much is clear from the latest reporting in The California Post, documenting how militant far-left activists from the Golden State are advising radicals in New York on the latest tactics for sabotaging federal immigration operations. But also yesterday , Immigrant groups have a message for their mostly White allies: Quit blowing the whistle on ICE. Fox News Digital has reviewed days of messages inside Signal chat rooms that reveal that a new internal feud has erupted inside the anti-ICE protest industry, pitting immigrant-led or...

Kidnapping for ransom went out of style with the Lindbergh Baby, but even that case was hinky . [T]he famous father took personal charge of many aspects of the investigation. He isolated household staff who may have had knowledge of his son’s medical condition from questioning by authorities including J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Also, following a cursory autopsy, he ordered the body cremated and the ashes scattered. And of course, it was a media sensation. Fast forward to the JonBenét Ramsey case , which involved a hinky ransom note, even though the child was later found strangled in the family home. It was also a media sensation, especially due to JonBenét's participation in child beauty pageants. But there are very few parallels in the real world. YouTuber crminal lawyer Bruce Rivers says on his channel, "I've been practicing law for almost thirty years. I've never once seen a kidnapping-ransom case." In other words, all the cases we see seem to...

Thinking about Glenn Reynolds, Ray Kurzweil, and cryonics, I began to go back to the only undergraduate courses that I've been able to use throughout my adult life (though they've consistently also gotten me into trouble, too), my minor in Philosophy. The video embedded above is by Jeffrey Kaplan, a Philosophy prof at UNC Greensboro, whose online courses I've found useful in keeping my thinking active in the field. In this one, he discusses the philosophical concept of a "zombie", a being that is physically identical to a human in every way. It behaves, talks, and reacts exactly like a person, but there is "nobody home" inside. This is a thought experiment that is used against the argument of physicalism, which is roughly equivalent to materialism. It seems to me that this is the philosophy underlying cryonics: notwithstanding you have been legally dead for hundreds of years, if you were vitrified, properly frozen quickly enough after your death, ...

I was all ready to talk about The Washington Post this morning, when I ran into this at Instapundit : Glenn Reynolds shills a Substack essay proposing that "the Singularity" is already here. He begins by citing Ray Kurzweil. At best, Kurzweil is an idiot savant , posssibly a brilliant inventor, but also, according to Wikipedia , a believer in freezing his body aftrer death in hopes of having it resuscitated at some future point: Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. After his death, he has a plan to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him. As of 2005, Reynolds was a big fan of this quackery, enthusiastically promoting the work of both Kurzweil and Aubrey de Gray , a promoter of human lifespan extension. According to the Wikipedia link, De Grey is a cryonicist, having signed up with Alcor. When...

Let's start with just one data item, the Real Clear Politics Trump approval average from yesterday . Trump's approval is 42.8%, his disapproval is 54.6%. The polls that make up the average range from the high 30s to 50% approval in one case, so RCP loads them all together, no matter the differences in methodology and bias, and gets an arithmetic mean, which I'm increasingly convinced is garbage in-garbage out. Below the numeric totals are several graphs showing Trump's overall approval trends, but I'm intrigued by the one that shows his first-term approvals. By the end of 2020, his approval was roughly 40%, while his disapproval was roughly 57%, which might explain why he "lost" that election -- except now we're beginning to learn that over 300,000 votes in Fulton County, Georgia are in question. He lost Georgia overall by only 11,779 votes. If equivalent questionable results in other states like Michigan and Arizona make the overall outcome of the...

In yesterday's post, and in this one last month , I demonstrated how easy it is to get an AI bot to generate prose that would otherwise be written by a human writing to formula like Victor Davis Hanson or Robert Reich. In my thinking, I've routinely taken this farther: there should be no reason for any paper to pay a weather reporter to write chirpy, cliche-ridden predictions of the day's weather. Just set up a bot to print that out (blue skies this morning, but take an umbrella!) at the time of day needed, and you've saved a high five-figure salary right there. But this brings me to Salem Media, until recently characterized as a "conservative media powerhouse", except that its financial performance has been poor, it's been unloading important properties like Regnery Publishing, and last April, Donald Trump Jr and Lara made a big investment with the idea of bringing them back: Today, Salem announces a historic, multi-dimensional de...

Over the weekend, a word popped into my head that I hadn't heard since graduate school: bovarysme . Bovarysme is a term derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), coined by Jules de Gaultier in his 1892 essay on Flaubert's novel, " Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l’œuvre de Flaubert ". It denotes a tendency towards escapist daydreaming in which the dreamer imagines themself to be a hero or heroine in a romance, whilst ignoring the everyday realities of the situation. The eponymous Madame Bovary is an example of this. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are anti-ICE demonstrations an example of bovarysme?" The reply says to me that AI is not stupid -- I doubt if more than a tiny percentage of four-year degree holders could give this answer: Bovarysme is a literary term derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It refers to a tendency toward escapist daydreaming where an individual imagines themselves as a heroic or ro...

On Patrol: Live with its earlier incarnation, Live PD , has been a major indicator of which way the political winds are blowing for law enforcement, especially since the show was off the air for more than two years following the George Floyd riots, despite the fact that it's reliably been a top show in its time slot. Its host, Dan Abrams, is a solid legacy media figure who was able to engineer the show's return, but it should never be forgotten he's legacy media through and through. It's genesrally recognized, though seldom explicitly stated, that as the show switches among ride-along vignettes from nine or ten departments each week, the producers generally do not feature scenes involving dead bodies, excesssive blood, nudity, or other situations that could be particularly disturbing. I've also noticed, though Abrams has never said explicitly, that the producers have seemed to avoid scenes involving illegal migrants identified as such, or inded any mention of t...