In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Trump's recent remarks about Elon Musk reminded me how refreshing his perceptions of other public figures used to be: Nancy Pelosi is “highly overrated and highly incompetent”. Jeb Bush is "an embarrassment to his family. . . . Frankly, he’s a stiff." Hillary Clinton "may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.” Drs Fauci and Birx were "two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” I hope that, regardless of the outcome, we get this sort of thing back, even for a little while. In the case of Elon Musk, I'd been having doubts already that even if he was the richest man in the world, he maybe wasn't the smartest, but Trump's assessment pushed these questions to the front of my mind. In the meme above, which it appears Musk put together himself and posted on Twitter, he seems to be laughing just a ...

If you go to YouTube and do a search on words like "HIMARS ammo explosion", you'll get well over a dozen hits, most representing recent attacks from Ukraine's new NATO high-precision rockets and artillery into Russian rear areas. The resulting detonations of ammunition depots can continue for hours, and in recent weeks, multiple strikes of this sort occur daily. It's difficult to think this isn't having an impact on the Russian campaign: if the assertion is that they've been firing tens of thousands of artillery rounds per day, how can they sustain this rate if some tens of thousands a day are going up in storage instead? This question has other ramifications, but I'm less interested in how the war is progressing than I am in how this question is being handled by some of our most prestigious analysts, viz , those employed by the Institute for the Study of War. Yesterday I posted on cogent commentary from the UK that suggests that whole cadres of pre...

The video above is a post on a UK YouTube channel called Podcast of the Lotus Eaters entitled "Corporate America is Adult Day Care". They're responding to a particular woman's TikTok portrayal of her typical work day at Linkedin, which is a Silicon Valley-based social media company comparable to Twitter, Facebook, or Google. On one hand, I would caution that working conditions and benefits vary widely among US corporate, small business, and government employers, and I would say that even among tech companies, not all engage in such extravagant pampering of employees. On the other hand, the woman in the TikTok video makes it unintentionally plain that Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and comparable employers do compete for the type of pampered, entitled pseudo-workers that she represents. I frequently commuted to Silicon Valley in my working career, and there's no question that the sorts of benefits, as well as other perks and tchotchkes, that she celebrates...

This seems to be one of those days where the conventional wisdom floods the web. But this had been one of those mornings where I sat up in bed suddenly thinking I remembered there'd been a Russian "operational pause" back in March, just before they completely withdrew from Irpin and Bucha and gave up the attempt to encircle Kyiv. So as soon as I finished my coffee, I started doing web searches, but no matter how I phrased my search, all I got was the latest "Russia Taking 'Operational Pause' in Ukraine, Analysts Say" from all the usual suspects, to the tune of over a million hits. Whence do these pearls of conventional wisdom emanate? One guess. Foreign analysts say Russia may be temporarily easing its offensive in Ukraine as the Russian military attempts to reassemble its forces for a renewed assault. On Wednesday, Russian forces made no claimed or assessed territorial gains in Ukraine “for the first time in 133 days of war,” according to the In...

As I've noted here, since last summer, Hunter Biden seems to have been kept on a very short leash in a heavily-guarded compound in the Malibu Hills that adjoins a luxury rehab facility. Over the past week, though, it's slowly emerged that he's apparently been paroled under parental supervision. According to the New York Post , The younger Biden, who has long been accused of profiting off his father’s influence and connections, has been a fixture in Washington this week after spending much of the Fourth of July weekend at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. After accompanying the president back to the nation’s capital on Marine One Monday, Hunter was pictured watching the Independence Day fireworks from the White House’s Truman Balcony with his 2-year-old son, Beau — named after his late older brother — and his father. He's pictured above with his wife, Melissa Cohen, although I question whether she (or particularly their toddler son) lives with him a...

I don't really have a dog in the whole Second Amendment fight; I don't own a gun and never have. I did some target shooting in my Boy Scout days and had an M1 issued to me in the ROTC, and that's about it. What bothers me about the current dispute in the wake of the Uvalde and Highland Park shootings is that existing laws and controls seem to have been observed only in the breach. For instance, The mayor of Uvalde, Texas, visibly frustrated with the constantly changing information released about what happened the day 19 children and two teachers were gunned down, lashed out Tuesday, telling residents at a city council meeting he's tired of being kept in the dark about what evidence has been uncovered. . . . McLaughlin sharply criticized the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and its leader, Col. Steven McCraw. The Texas Rangers, a DPS agency, are leading the investigation into the shooting and McLaughlin told residents he was upset that he and other cit...

As far as I can tell, President Biden gave at least two formal speeches on Monday to celebrate July 4. One of them, that's had more publicity, said America has "come up short" and "feels like it is going backward." It refers indirectly to the Highland Park shooting. So far, though, I haven't found a full text on line. A second, which does have a text at the White House site , differs considerably from these remarks and doesn't contain the specific phrases that have been shown in video clips and quoted in reporting. I simply don't know if this is one speech with the delivered text heavily revised, or two different speeches. However, I'm going to discuss the text in the link at the White House site. If anyone can clarify what's what here, I'll greatly appreciate it. What intrigues me about the text is that I think it does reflect Biden's mind sufficiently that he must be a principal originator. I very much doubt that he wrote an...