In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 S tar 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 Mandal...

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 ad...

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...

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 extrasensor...

Last week, I posted a 30,000-foot view of how badly the California High Speed Rail project has fallen short of what was sold to the taxpayers in 2008. The version that legacy media now seems to accept without question is that the project has been trimmed to a "first phase" 171-mile segment between Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley, for instance here at the Fresno Bee from last February : Today, after years of delays and cost increases, the rail authority is required to focus on first completing a 171-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield route, which the agency is hoping to finish by 2032 at an estimated cost of $34.76 billion. However, it isn't clear where the 2032 completion date comes from. 2032 was an estimate for the completion of the whole LA-to-San Francisco project as of 2018, but as 0f 2022, there was no projected completion date for either the entire project or any segment. And this appears to be only the received version of the project that legac...

The current focus on AI reminds me of the "Y2K Problem", now more than a quarter century behind us. According to Wikipedia , The term Year 2000 problem, or simply Y2K, refers to potential computer errors related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates in and after the year 2000. Many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, e.g. 1985 as 85, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Computer systems' inability to distinguish dates correctly had the potential to bring down worldwide infrastructures for computer-reliant industries. In the years leading up to the turn of the millennium, the public gradually became aware of the "Y2K scare", and individual companies predicted the global damage caused by the bug would require anything between $400 billion and $600 billion to rectify. A lack of clarity regarding the potential dangers of the bug led some to stock up on food, water, and firearms, purchase ...

An intelligently controlled trans-medium swarm of UAPs flying around a submarine. A massive national security issue if indeed that is our submarine being monitored. UFO Dump #2 pic.twitter.com/o5XOo4vNEJ — Brian Gamble (@briangamble_v1) May 22, 2026 So the Trump administration has released a second tranche of alleged UAP files, which do nothing but raise the same questions people have had since the flying saucer craze of the 1940s: Why Are There No High-Quality UFO Photos Despite Frequent Sightings? Or put another way, why are the photos we see such cheesy fakes? Take the example in the tweet above, a video which the poster claims to be "an intelligently controlled trans-medium swarm of UAPs flying around a submarine." My own reaction was that, at least with my eyes, I couldn't see a swarm of anything. But the comments raise even more questions: Not a US sub. U.S. sub? LMAO🤣 Accordoing to Chrome AI mode (which still hasn't tried to flat...

Gavin Newsom, who's term limited as California governor and leaves office on January 4, 2027, is clearly gearing up to run for president in 2028. Apparently he's waking up to what will be a major vulnerability when he starts his campaign, the California High Speed Rail Project : California’s HSR is perhaps the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country. And the reason it failed is because of a gross failure of state governance, one on such a grand scale that it is nothing short of a betrayal of Californians. The extent of the betrayal is only slowly coming to light, in part because legacy media reporters simply can't get their heads around an enterprise this size, and in part because they enable the whole fraud-based ecosystem. Independent analyst-journalists like Christopher Rufo and Nick Shirley have been working on the fringes of medical and welfare fraud in places like Minnesota and Los Angeles, but the level of high speed rail goe...

I keep wanting to dismiss the Spencer Pratt campaign, but it's been attracting serious attention from as far away as Australia, as the clip embedded above shows. Yesterday, Trump gave him a quasi-endorsement : Speaking to reporters Wednesday before boarding Air Force One, the president of the United States and former host of “The Apprentice” declared that Spencer Pratt – the villain of MTV’s “The Hills” and current candidate for mayor of America’s second-largest city – is “a big MAGA person” whom he’d “like to see do well.” Just like that, Pratt’s insurgent meme-filled campaign for Los Angeles mayor, which is giving incumbent Mayor Karen Bass a run for her money in California’s sprawling deep-blue metropolis, took yet another unpredictable turn. Pratt, a 42-year-old reality TV star who launched his candidacy in January after losing his Pacific Palisades home in the devastating 2025 wildfires, is running as an independent, building his campaign around voter fury a...

Mayor Karen Bass has turned Los Angeles into a magnet for the street homeless. The numbers are shocking: • 64% are from outside the City of LA • 40% are from outside California • 6% are from outside the United States pic.twitter.com/4HHsSQM2Xw — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) May 19, 2026 Christopher Rufo's reporting on the Haitian migrant problems in Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA for City Journal had an impact on the 2024 election. In those pieces, he showed the economic interdependency of NGOs, landlords, sweatshop employeers, car dealers, and others in making money out of resettling Haitian migrants in "temporary protected status". Such programs have major impacts on native-born members of surrounding communities, including landlords who evict longtime tenants to get higher rents from overcrowded units rented to migrants, for instance. Rufo is now starting to take a similar approach in a piece posted on his website: More Than Half of L.A.'s Stre...

Via The Times of Israel : A week after a university commencement speaker was canceled because of a tweet claiming that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, the allegation leapt into the pages of The New York Times. The columnist Nicholas Kristof included the claim in a column alleging widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. Detailing the account of an unnamed Gaza journalist who says guards summoned a dog when he was imprisoned in 2024, Kristof writes, “He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.” Linking to a range of pro-Palestinian sources, he notes that other prisoners had recounted similar experiences elsewhere. Elsewhere , The article drew widespread reactions around the world, including protests and calls to cancel subscriptions. On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper for libel agains...