In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

The value of a college education : In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier. . . . Historically, the prestige of higher education relied on a form of geographic and information monopoly. In 2002, the narrative surrounding a teenager’s future was tightly managed by local gatekeepers—parents, high school guidance counselors, and FCC-regulated television networks that uniformly reinforced the traditional American Dream. If these gatekeepers insisted that a bachelor’s degree was the sole gateway to a middle-class life, a teenager had few tools to verify or challenge that claim. The cultural value of the...