In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Over the past two weeks, tne National Geographic Channel ran the four-part BBC series Titanic Sinks Tonight , which has its own Wikipedia entry . This is a peculiar new iteration of the Titanic story from the UK side of the Atlantic; the US version tends to concentrate on the "pride" side of the story in songs like "Down With the Old Canoe", while the UK version tends toward hand-wringing over things like the class system, wealth, and so forth. Per Wikipedia, The series places emphasis on the social class and sex of the passengers, as well as the perceived mistakes by those in command. The BBC definitely wrings its hands. It's worth noting that of the six talking heads who offer commentary on the action, four are women. Of the women, one is an apparently mandatory non-white, Somali-born novelist Nadifa Mohamed, whose unsmiling face seems to be there chiefly as buzzkill. That they would need to provide an African perspective on the story is incongruous ...

Back in 2024, I had several posts on the problems that Haitians on temporary protected status were causing in Springfield, OH, including one on Gov DeWine's support for the program . In this post , I outlined how the mayor profited by renting apartments he owned to Haitians, and that he and DeWine appeared together in a press conference demanding that then-candidate Trump stop making "false allegations" against them. However, at least so far, there's no evidence that DeWine has profited personally from the program. Nevertheless, in the wake of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling that allows Trump to end temporary protected status for Haitians, DeWine prominently disagreed, although he simply repeated the same 2024 talking points in the CNN interview embedded above: It is not in the United States's interest, certainly not in Ohio's interest, to have people who are working every single day, who are supporting a family, who are buying houses, startin...

A piece by Fred Fleitz, former chief of staff at the National Security Coluncil under Trump 45, in American Greatness : In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have repeatedly struck oil refineries in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moscow’s main refinery in Kapotnya was hit twice in a single week in mid-June, sparking massive fires that sent thick plumes of black smoke billowing over the capital and disrupting fuel supplies and airport operations. . . . These attacks are much more than symbolic. They are precision strikes that target the economic engine funding Putin’s war machine. At the same time, Russian forces have suffered catastrophic losses—estimates now exceed 1.3 million casualties (killed, wounded, and missing), with Ukrainian General Staff figures approaching 1.4 million as of late June 2026 and independent Western assessments confirming well over a million. . . . Russia’s spring–summer offensive has stalled. In April 2026, Russian forces recorded a net loss of territory ...

In the second half of 2025, and continuing into February of this year, Trump sponsored a major effort to settle the Ukrane war : Since mid-November 2025, there has been a renewed diplomatic push to secure a peace agreement in Ukraine. Fresh rounds of talks were prompted by reports that US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart, Kirill Dmitriev, had been working on a 28-point peace plan. . . . Many of the proposals outlined in the plan are not new. They prompted concern among Ukraine and its European allies that the plan was overly favourable to Russia and that it reiterated Russia’s maximalist demands for resolving the conflict, including the ceding of territory. Following talks in Geneva between the US, Ukraine and European allies on 23 and 24 November 2025, a new deal was reported to be on the table. Details of that revised plan have not been made public, but it is thought to be based on European counterproposals that limit Russian gains. . . . Three rou...

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German ex-physicist who several years ago got frustrated with the academic environment, dropped out, and became a full-time YouTube commentator on general science issues. Her commentary on AI is provocative, but I'm not sure if it's entirely well-informed, and it has the problem of trying to talk about an abstraction as if it's something concrete, in other words, hypostatization. (This was my hobby horse when I taught freeshman comp half a cenrury ago.) At 1:13, she says, The future is not everyone gets a genius assistant. The future is your genius assistant is currently unavailable, because billionaires are using it to optimize tax avoidance. The artificially intelligent systems we currently have are just about to become useful in some domains like coding and text-based tasks. They're still far away from humanlike general intelligence, but we'll get there. . . . Large language models have serious shortcomings. Most importantly, ...

The current crisis in the UK is turning out to be a sort of backhand civics lesson for those of us in the US. The UK parliamentary system basically provides for a single set of elections to the House of Commons every five years, unless the prime minister asks the king to call an election, which the king must then do. The prime minister can nevertheless call for an election at any time if he thinks it might strengthen his position, or if he loses a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. As of now, the five-year term until the next mandatory election doesn't expire until August 2029, but there are clearly issues in the UK that ought to be resolved by a general election before then, especially migration, even-handed prosecution of migrant crime, and accountability for the decades-long grooming gang scandal. In the US, regular two-year elections for the House of Representatives, along with four-year presidential elections and staggered six-year Senate terms, serve as regular ...

Temperature check: just three years ago , In mid-May [2023], the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team invited an activist LGBTQ+ drag troupe called the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” whose members are known for dressing in drag resembling the black-and-white habits of Catholic nuns, to appear at the team’s annual Pride event next month. The group’s members, it’s worth noting, use various sexual and blasphemous stage names that really don’t bear repeating. They annually host a “Foxy Mary and Hunky Jesus” contest on Easter Sunday — the holiest day of the year for Christians. According to Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron, who previously served as an auxiliary bishop in L.A., this year’s performance included one performer using the cross in a pole-dancing routine. . . . A public outcry from leaders of the Catholic Church prompted the Dodgers to rescind their plans to honor the group with a “Community Hero Award,” as initially announced. But the Dodgers caved to progressive voices a...

This was Trump's remark the other day about Keir Starmer. But here's my question: were we ever dealing with Winston Churchill? YouTube toff Jacob Rees-Mogg in the clip embedded above characterizes Churchill as "one of the great heroes of our country". He lists several others, including Elizabeth I, William Pitt the younger, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington, but he concludes, "the greatest hero of them all has to be Churchill". Just yesterday, Keith Humphreys in The Washington Monthly referred nostalgically to the UK election of 1924: Consider some political history. In the 24th year of the century, the Labour Party won a third of the vote in the general election, a disastrous performance that cost it 40 seats and led to a further descent into minority status. That was the nature of British politics in 1924, whereas in 2024 a comparable level of popularity with voters allowed Starmer-led Labour to gain 209 seats and achieve a stonking maj...

The alt aggregators were teasing Starmer's rumored Monday resignation, or at least his announcement of a transition plan, all weekend, but once the news dropped, only Breitbart had it . British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at times appeared on the verge of tears as he announced that he’d lost the confidence of the governing Labour Party and would resign, but nevertheless set a months-long departure period that will see him through to the end of the summer. The resignation of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer could barely be heard in Downing Street as protesters outside the gate blasted Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ — the anthem of the European Union — as he spoke on Monday morning. Sir Keir boasted of the achievements he perceived he had made in office before setting out his timetable for departure, confirming he would remain on as caretaker Prime Minister during a summer-long leadership challenge. The best, though certainly not perfect, analysis I've seen is fro...

Prominent libertarian, transhumanist, law professor, and intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds has just run an essay on corruption in universities in the New York Post. I love it when professors stand up and loudly proclaim they're not like the bastards who run the place. The path to tenure is so crowded with choices to take the system or leave it that nobody who's made a career in the academy can claim to be without sin -- but let's leave that aside for now. Reynolds's latest brought back to mind his transhumanist faith, through which he's publicly acknowledged that he has a contract to have his head removed and frozen at the time of his putative "death", on rhe expectation that at some future date, Science will not only have developed a cure for what finally ailed him, but it will be able to thaw his frozen head out, resuscitate it, reattach it to a donor body, and presumably allow him to resume his tenured chair at the University of Tennessee Kn...

The UK held an unscheduled election in the district of Makerfield , part of greater Manchester, on Thursday: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday he would not walk away, vowing ​to fight any challenge from his leading party rival Andy Burnham and potentially ushering in a new bout of political instability. Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, won ‌a decisive victory for Labour to claim a parliamentary seat in northwest England, and has signalled that he will use it to enter any contest to replace Starmer. However, except for the race being a focus of Labour's effort to replace its own leader, Starmer, this would be a dog-bites-man story; Makerfield has been a safe Labour seat for over 100 years. However, Nigel Farage seems to have had a vain hope to win the seat for Reform in an upset : Nigel Farage says he is disappointed with Reform UK's performance in the Makerfield by-election, as he blamed his party's defeat on a desire among voters to eject...

𝕏 is the #1 news app in the UK. This is exactly why the BBC, The Telegraph and other UK legacy media keep pushing negative fake attacks on Elon Musk. They are getting destroyed in the rankings. The British public has rejected them. Legacy media is finished. They are lashing… pic.twitter.com/UBdVCU65eM — DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) June 18, 2026 This post here from last weekend gives just a glimpse of the UK uniparty's program to control media coverage of migrant stabbings and grooming gangs, and in fact, UK legacy media has been generally cooperative. The problem is that, just as in the US, people are bypassing legacy media to get their news. In the post embedded above, the legacy BBC, equivalent to the US PBS, is ranked fourth behind X, reddit, and something called Nextdoor: Neighbour Network. I asked the AI oracle if Nextdoor: Neighbour Network is legacy media, and it answered, No, Nextdoor is not a legacy media organization. It is a hyper-local social networking platform....

A recent piece, The Inexplicable Suicide of Hollywood , inadvertently ties the disastrous underperformance of the two latest summer blockbusters together: Since starting this article, Hollywood has experienced a summer blockbuster phenomenon with the success of two thrillers, Obsession , an indie produced by a YouTuber making over $230 million on a budget of $750,000 and Backrooms , a larger indie distributed by A24 making $118 million on a $10 million budget and directed by twenty-year-old. Audiences showed up to theaters for these two movies while shunning a $165 million Disney Star Wars movie released at the same time. It looks like he submitted his piece before this past weekend's disappointment with Spielberg, which just reinforces his point. To be fair, there really isn’t one single cause, but the ones you don’t hear are probative. You’ll never hear that the content just sucks; that we just haven’t been producing entertainment that’s widely enjoyed. And that we’re wi...

In connection with my recent posts on migrant-related stabbings in the UK, I've mentioned a related problem referred to there as "grooming gangs". According to Wikipedia , Several government reviews have reported failures by British institutions in preventing, identifying and prosecuting the widespread cases of group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation that mostly occurred between the 1990s and 2010s. Allegations of governmental and institutional failures to respond to the problem or to downplay or cover up the issue have been described as a grooming gangs scandal. . . . Media coverage and political discourse around these crimes has especially focused on the ethnic and religious background of perpetrators in high-profile cases, most of whom were Muslim men of Pakistani descent, and whether this prevented proper investigation. Data in Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire shows that, in the 2020s, men of an Asian ethnic background are dispropo...