In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The problem with Glenn Reynolds and the other contributors to the Instapundit blog is that they're intellectual welterweights at best. Reynolds is a transhumanist who used to talk a lot about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, not so muich lately, probably because like the melting of the polar ice, it was supposed to happen but hasn't. He's also a libertarian, which is a different way of saying he's an Ayn Rand cultist. I've never been able to find out if he has a contract to have his head frozen when he dies. The other day I ran across a link on that site to an odd essay purporting to explain what's happening, “Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century” , which is actually just a link to yet another essay, the sort of thing they love at Instapundit. The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century”. The phrase recognized that to speak of “the ninete...

I notice that a popular airline pilot who has a YouTube channel with 309,000 subscribers, Captain Steeeve, was forced to take down a video that covered the September 29 Reagan National collision: We recently took down a major video that we had put up on the channel, and many of you have noticed that, and I wanted to address that topic. I'm an active pilot for a major aiirline in this country, and I have to be sensitive to those concerns in my life as well, and all of us are aware of the recent events in aviation, they are headline news still to this day, and I just want to let you know at this channel, we're monitoring those events. But that one video in particular I was asked to take down, and I gladly took it down. Now, over the years I taught a course in the Navy on leadership, and one of the lessons I taught in that course was, never forget about the"whos" behind the "whats". Now, what does that mean? That means that there are people and re...

Here's the usual disclaimer: all I know about aviation comes from watching Air Disasters and Juan Browne's YouTube channel, which means I know zilch. I'm not a pilot, I've never had flying lessons, and I've never had a check ride. Nevertheless, a couple of things keep bothering me about Chairman Homendy's briefing Friday. From Air Disasters , I at least know that several landmark crash investigations have centered on crew resource management, including the responsibility of the pilot monitoring (as opposed to the pilot flying) to speak up forcefully, and in extreme cases take control, if the pilot flying is doing something really dumb. So this is a potential issue when looking at the January 29 collision. There's a closely related issue that this was a check ride, which Chairman Homendy made clear in Friday's briefing. In this case, the pilot monitoring was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, who was also the instructor pilot. This page outli...

I've been deeply skeptical of the NTSB's investigation of the January 29 collision of a helicopter and a jet landing at Reagan National Airport on January 29, especially after Todd Inman's remarks at the February 1 press conference implying disagreements among the investigators over releasing data on the helicopter's altitude. This has been a sensitive question since the investigation began, and it clearly continues to be, since the NTSB held an update press conference yesterday afternoon, the traditional Friday bad-news dump. Here's a transcript of Chairman Homendy's remarks at the press conferenc e. There isn't a whole lot that's new, and what is, is buried within the old. ABC News gives the approved version of the briefing: There's no indication the U.S. Army Black Hawk crew could tell there was an impending collision before its devastating crash with an American Airlines plane in Washington, D.C., National Transportation Safety Board...

Up to now, I've been following what seems to be the received total of something over $100 million as the annual amount the Catholic Church gets in US government grants. For instance, Vice President Vance used this number in a speech reported by America magazine : And I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line? I mentioned the same amount in this post , but so far I haven't been able to find the source, and the vice president doesn't list it, either. The problem I'm beginning to have is that the actual amounts in grants from all US government sources to the Catholic Church are starting to look much, much larger. I linked to a story from Just the News in yesterday's post that said in part: . . . For example...

I've already noted here the potential crisis the US Catholic bishops face in taking a public stance against the Trump administration's desire at minimum to cut back on funding to NGOs, including nominally Catholic programs, that have woke objectives. On January 28, immediately after Trump's imitial announcemnt of that policy, Catholic Charities, a major recipient of this funding, urged the Trump administration to “rethink” its pause on federal funding for executive departments, noting the “millions of Americans who rely on this life-giving support.” . . . “For more than a century, the Catholic Charities network has worked with the government to care for poor and vulnerable people in every community in the U.S., and we continue to be eager to work with government to care for our neighbors in need,” [Catholic Charities CEO Kerry Alys] Robinson said. “We strongly urge the administration to rethink this decision.” On the other hand, there's some question a...

Sen Lindsey Graham announces he's been red-pilled over USAID. and at 1:51 above, he says, Samantha [Power] has been texting me morning, noon, and night, Samantha, look in the mirror! The reason USAID is going to cease to exist as it did before is because it should! Sundance at Conservative Treehouse says "We can officially say this moment achieves ‘peak Graham.’" Graham has in fact been a chief advcocate of USAID up to this point, when Elon Musk has suddenly exposed the grift and Graham realizes he'd better get on the right side of the issue. Sounds very fishy https://t.co/68ToeBRN6d — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025 I've looked at Samantha Power's career now and then, and irrespective of the latest allegations of her net worth, she's always struck me as among the privileged for being special. According to Wikipedia , Samantha Jane Power (born September 21, 1970) is an Irish-American journalist, diplomat, and government official ...