In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As I mentioned in my post on Amtrak last week , there's a whole sub-sub genre of YouTubers who liveblog their Amtrak trips. They aren't really train buffs like I am; they seem just to enjoy the scenery combined with amenities like eating in the dining car or riding in the sleeping cars or business class. This would be perfectly fine, except that Amtrak travel is predictably nightmarish, with trains regularly canceled or running nine or 12 hours late or even longer, with the diner and snack bar out of food, toilets clogged, heat out, and so forth. In that post last week, I mentioned one of the best-known Amtrak YouTube channels, Grounded Life Travel, with the charming couple Allie and Rob, who go ga-ga over the Amtrak long distance trains they ride several times a year on crosss-country trips, often between cruises on opposite coasts. Frankly, this sort of Amtrak travel is high-risk activity. Even Allie and Rob mention oh, by the way, Amtrak canceled the Coast Starlight on t...

In a remarkable interview with Bret Baier on Fox, Elon Musk and members of his DOGE team put on a surprisingly grounded performance. Musk sometimes comes off as having a little too much fun trolling his opponents, but this interview gives a clear idea of why he's gotten so rich -- he actually understands business and IT, something most business and IT people don't. However, it's difficult to find a single written transcript. The best I can come up with is in this post at Red State , which quotes extensive excerpts, for instance, MUSK: We're talking about elementary financial controls, that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. The changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit, it will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that the...

I found a pretty typical legacy media take from CBS Miami this morning, More than half a million Latin American, Haitian immigrants given deadline to self-deport : The Department of Homeland Security officially posted a notice to end protections for 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to the Federal Register on Tuesday. This sets up a 30-day deadline, which will fall on April 24, for those affected to self-deport or face the consequences. "The Department of Homeland Security is warning that if these people do not voluntarily depart the country, they will be found, arrested and deported from the country," CBS News immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez said. "In fact, the administration is saying that the people affected by this policy change should sign up to self-register on a smartphone app provided by the government and tell people that they will be departing the country." This isn't really news to start with; this step had b...

Via Breitbart : Canada’s conservative leader wants to win the nation’s April 28 national elections and is hammering Justin Trudeau’s replacement for supporting the massive legal immigration that has caused massive pocketbook damage to ordinary Canadians. . . . The two parties are close in the polls as Poilievre slams Carney for supporting Trudeau’s very unpopular immigration policy. n 2015, the investor-led Century Initiative persuaded Trudeau to grow the economy by inflating the nation’s population from 36 million to 100 million by 2100. Since then, Trudeau has imported four million migrants — or 10 percent of the nation’s population, which is the equivalent of 33 million migrants in the United States. That huge population of legal migrants — which includes many Indians and migrants who are too old to work — inflicted an economic shock and massive economic damage to 30 million ordinary Canadians. It cut wages, exacerbated healthcare shortages, and spiked housing costs. I...

I still find myself in a peculiar rabbit hole trying to make sense of the various refugee resettlement programs for which the Trump administration has cut funding, especially those delegated by various departments to the US Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities. No discussion I've seen is especially precise or seems to reflect any real understanding of how these programs work, much less which program is which, especially those under the Catholic umbrella. Let's start with the USCCB's lawsuit against the Trump administration filed in February : Catholic bishops sued the Trump administration on Tuesday [February 18] over its abrupt halt to funding of refugee resettlement, calling the action unlawful and harmful to newly arrived refugees and to the nation's largest private resettlement program. . . . The conference's Migration and Refugee Services has sent layoff notices to 50 workers, more than half its staff, with additional cuts expected in local...

I'm surprised that I hadn't even heard of the CHNV program before I learned just the other day that the Trump administration had discontinued it. According to Wikipedia , which appears to be the most complete account: Humanitarian Parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans was a program under which citizens of these four countries, and their immediate family members, could be paroled into the United States for a period of up to two years if a person in the US agreed to financially support them. The program allowed a combined total of 30,000 people per month from the four countries to enter the US. The program was implemented in 2022 (Venezuela) to 2023 (Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua) in response to high numbers of migrants and asylum seekers from these countries crossing into the US at the southwest border with Mexico. . . . The CHNV Program is credited with greatly reducing numbers of people of these nationalities crossing into the US at the southwest ...

The goal of the Biden administration was to strategically place illegals in swing states and make their status legal, thereby turning swing states Democrat. The net result would have been permanent one-party rule of the USA, just like what they did in California. https://t.co/n9iOL6QP7P — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 22, 2025 Whatever Elon Musk may be, one thing he certainly isn't is a Biblical scholar. But there's scriptural support for his position in the post above, and it's something the USCCB, among whom there must certainly be some Biblical scholars, omit in their web page outlining the Church's teaching on migration : Both the Old and New Testaments tell compelling stories of refugees forced to flee because of oppression. Exodus tells the story of the Chosen People, Israel, who were victims of bitter slavery in Egypt. They were utterly helpless by themselves, but with God's powerful intervention they were able to escape and take refuge in the desert...