In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In a nutshell , Newly disclosed bank records, released on Monday as part of the House Republicans' ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Biden, indicate that Hunter Biden arranged direct, monthly payments to his father. The records show that at least one payment of $1,380 was sent from Hunter Biden’s Owasco PC to Joe Biden in September 17, 2018. On one hand, this is just the drip-drip-drip pattern of classic Washington scandals, ranging from the White House insistence in March 1973 that nobody had prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary, to Bill Clinton's insistence that he never had sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky, whereby presidential denials that such-and-such ever happened are gradually refuted as evidence surfaces that indeed they did. Ms Jean-Pierre's comment after being asked about the bank record was simply part of the pattern: “So, I have to be clear with you. I have not seen that report, so I would have to refer you to my colleagues over at the W...

From the UK Daily Mail: Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor's degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed. And 55 percent said they'd already eliminated degree requirements this year, according to an Intelligent.com survey of 800 US employers, carried out in November. It comes after Walmart, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America and Google announced similar plans. The survey found that the same employers that have already eliminated Bachelor's degree requirements were far more likely to continue doing so. The Daily Mail title starts with "How the college degree lost its value", and the story implies this is a new trend. My own experience in the job market as a refugee from academia suggests the trend isn't quite so novel. Reflecting on my career path, after I left graduate work and low-level teaching, I went almost exclusively into jobs that simply hadn't existed before the computer age in the...

I've put up another post on he Michael Voris controversy at the Cold Case File blog .

According to Wikipedia, Felicity Huffman is best known for her role as Lynette Scavo in the ABC comedy-drama Desperate Housewives (2004–2012. But more recently, she's been better known for her role in the Varsity Blues scandal. At the link, Huffman was among dozens charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office on March 12, 2019, in a nationwide college entrance exam cheating scandal. Prosecutors alleged that Huffman's $15,000 donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation, ostensibly a charitable contribution, was in fact payment to someone who posed as Huffman's daughter Sophia to take the SAT, receiving a score that showed significant improvement over Sophia's score on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT). Huffman was arrested at her California home on March 12 by FBI agents and IRS agents and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud. According to Breitbart News , Actress Felicity Huffman, who spent 11 days in jail after bribing college officia...

Right now, the US is fighting two hot proxy wars, one in Ukraine and one in Gaza, but at the moment, it's running out of money : The military, like the rest of the federal government, is operating under a temporary funding measure that freezes spending at the previous year’s levels. And because the Middle East troop movements weren’t planned, the Pentagon has had to pull money from existing operations and maintenance accounts, DOD spokesperson Chris Sherwood said. President Joe Biden signed the stopgap measure this month to keep the government open until lawmakers can agree on a full-year spending bill. . . . “Current events have revised some of the operational assumptions used to develop the FY 2024 President’s Budget request. Specifically, neither the base budget request nor the FY 2024 supplemental request included funding for U.S. operations related to Israel,” he said. “We’re taking it out of hide,” Sherwood added. This may bear some relation to reports of reduced ...

While researching Wednesday's post on foreign students, I ran into this essay from last July at Forbes by Michael Nietzel, President Emeritus of Missouri State University, How The Admission Practices Of Elite Colleges Perpetuate The Advantages Of The Wealthy . Again, received opinion by writers like David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic has been that the elite colleges are meritocratic, admissions are driven by SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. Nietzel's argument is that the numbers simply don't point in that direction. While only 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution do so. . . . The authors [of a recent Brown University study] estimate that this higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students being admitted from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 student...

I've put up a post with more information from a former insider at Church Militant on the Cold Case File blog.